Last time we talked about the leaders responsibility: it is their job to put people in work that matches how they actually think and behave, and what actually drives them. This one is about your responsibility as a candidate.
Fit isn’t only something leadership is responsible for. It’s something you owe yourself, and something you owe the people who get the version of you that walks in the door at night. When a job doesn’t fit, most people stay anyway and call it the safe choice. Steady paycheck, known quantity, why rock the boat. But look at what that safe job is actually costing you. You spend a third of your life on work, in a place and with people that drain you instead of work that builds you. You get good at masking, at performing a version of yourself that isn’t quite real. And the hollowed-out person that job produces is the one your family and friends get for dinner. There is nothing safe about slowly becoming less of yourself. That is a VERY expensive choice and the expenses are the relationships you treasure most.
We’re not talking about a job that is good 70% of the time. There will never be 100% alignment between you and the job, hiring manager and team, but if you find yourself having panic attacks in the parking lot before work every day, or you dread going to work every day because you don’t think the work is important, or the people around you are draining (or worse – infuriating) every day, then it’s simply not sustainable. Physical illness, mental illness and burnout are inevitable.
In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights named “free choice of employment” as a basic right, listed alongside free speech and freedom from fear. Free choice. Not only the right to hold a job, the right to choose work that fits. You cannot choose work that fits you if you have never once stopped to name what fit even looks like for you. We will research a car for three weeks and then spend forty years in a job we drifted into.
We can list every reason we are unhappy and not one for what would actually light us up. So start there, and start small. Name one task in your work that reliably drains you, the thing you dread and keep putting off. Then name one that reliably lights you up, the thing you would do even on a bad day. Write both down. That data, what empties you and what fills you, is the first honest data you have about your own fit. You do not have to quit anything. You just have to stop pretending the gap isn’t there, and start collecting the data. Fit isn’t a perk. It’s an obligation, owed to yourself, your employer, and most importantly the people you are in closest relationship to because they get what’s left over after your day at work.
Source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23 (United Nations, 1948). Full text at ohchr.org.