Happy Friday from Southern California.
One day during my almost 3-year stint as a postdoctoral researcher, I experienced what I later understood was an anxiety attack.
I drove to work, parked, and started to shake. Then I started to cry. So I did what all thirty-four year-olds do when they are distressed: I called my mother and told her over the phone I was anxious about going to work.
My work environment wasn’t toxic. I had a generous boss. My co-workers were cool most of the time. You know what else? I was a productive researcher.
Yet, here I was, deeply distressed about spending one more day at my job as a researcher.
This deep dissatisfaction was not a day in the making.
Even after that event, I continued to tell myself that if I “tried hard enough” and had enough “grit” I would make it as a researcher. So I justified the dread.
Almost a decade on from that day, I don’t work in academic research and I know this: you can never train a cat to be a fish. They have their unique strengths and it is important to let them shine in those. I know we are not cats and fish but the analogy made the best sense to me.
As part of my research process for the book I’m working on currently, I took the research-based CliftonStrengths Assessment. I wasn’t shocked to find Communicator as one of my top five strengths.
Even though I have had to work at honing my skills, writing, speaking, and communicating in general have always been easy for me. Time literally disappears when I have to write this newsletter, work on a book, write a scientific piece, or prepare a speech.
There’s no striving. And I have never had to justify dread.
Question for you whether you are currently job searching or have worked in a career for the last 5 or 10 years: are you planning to work or doing work in an area that leverages your strengths or are you on that path by default?
This is not the same as the passion hypothesis tech billionaires like to push.
Passion can be fleeting.
You live with your strengths forever.
Thoughts? Email me back and let me know.
Until next time.
Gertrude Nonterah, Ph.D.
Author of Navigating the P.I.V.O.T.