Small Tweaks

Posted by on April 27, 2021

Small Tweaks

After a year of the pandemic, some folks are still working from home – and are kind of over it. I love this piece written by a former client, Catherine, who not only expresses what a lot of us are feeling, but also invites us to get creative with small tweaks before making big changes. Enjoy! ~Jen

______________________________________________________________

The chair had lost its fluff. I was sinking into the frame of the second hand dining room chair. Probably because I’d been sitting in that chair for forty plus hours a week since March 2020. When the pandemic started, I, like millions of people around the world, swapped an ergonomically designed office chair for a dining room chair.

Around the same time the pandemic drove people to start working from home en masse, I also started a new job. Because the job was new, it fed my inquisitive nature and desire to be challenged. Now, a year in, the job has lost some of its fluff. What was once a welcome challenge is now mundane. But I’m not ready to completely scrap what I have and start over. So instead I’ll make some tweaks. I’ll also keep doing the mundane – the bookkeeping, the data entry, and the scheduling – because those things need to be done and because I need a job. But I’ll also ask for some more of what I want – something that’s a challenge, something that involves solving a problem with more than one right answer. And maybe those small changes will be enough until I find the next right thing. 

I swapped my chair with the chair across the table. It’s still a second hand dining room chair, but it has a little more oomph than the one I’ve been using. For now, that small tweak has been enough. Enough to get me through to whatever is next. Whether that’s returning to the office, or giving in and spending some extra money to bring part of the office to me.  

Do you feel like your job has lost its fluff? Maybe a few tweaks will be enough to get you through to the next step. Ask for the type of tasks you want to be doing. Take a daily walking break. Pick up a hobby to feed the creativity your job lacks. Small changes can have an impact larger than expected. And if tweaks aren’t enough, you can always buy the office chair or scrap the job. 

******

I would love to claim that I came to these realizations on my own. In reality, it took Jen Frank’s career coaching group to help me understand that while some situations do call for a complete overhaul, less drastic changes such as advocating for yourself within your current role or making changes outside of work are also effective routes to job satisfaction. If you want to explore what’s next in your work life, consider joining one of Jen’s career coaching groups!

p.s. from Jen: As always, your comments are welcome on this post at https://www.facebook.com/jenfrankcoaching.

p.p.s. from Jen: The spring career coaching group is already underway, but if you want to be part of a future group see: https://jenfrankcoaching.com/career-group/