Not the title you might expect from a career coach I suppose. It’s not exactly in line with the positive thinking zeitgeist that career coaches like me are supposed to peddle. However, I’ve just finished watching the original Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin cycle and I can’t help but feeling that poor old Reggie pretty well sums it all up for me.
I was almost in tears as I watched the final episode of series three. I laughed throughout the second half of the episode as Reggie, having accepted defeat with the failure of his self-help community is once again forced to rejoin the rat race working for an aerosol manufacturer. His first special project was to carry out some futile market research on new air freshener fragrances.
It was one of the funniest 15 minutes or so of comedy I have seen in a very long time, and it was so very sad as well. I would defy anyone to empathise with Perrin as he realises that he is doomed to a life of dreary, meaningless work, only this time he knows that there is no escape. As his mind keeps flashing back to the series’ opening image of him stripping off at the beach and disappearing into the sea, I couldn’t help feeling that this time his fantasy was that he would not swim back to shore. By the time he says his final line, asking his secretary to find out train times to the Dorset coast, my bottom lip was quivering like a wobble board.
The series was made over thirty years ago and it seems as prescient today as it must have been for so many middle Englanders back then. I talk to people who simply feel disconnected from any meaning in their work. We are all part a large machine called “the economy” and for many of us our individual role is to produce or provide things that are no more useful than artificial air fresheners. It’s hard to feel as if we are making any kind of meaningful contribution to the world around us. We are all dispensable; we are as throwaway as the products and services we produce.
Well this is a lovely positive message from a coach isn’t it? I’m supposed to instil a sense of optimism about all this. I’m supposed to tell you that you can have a fulfilling career. One in which you find meaning and look back on with some sense of pride.
Well, I don’t think I can do that. I can’t guarantee that you can find a career that you really love and gives you meaning as you travel the very linear journey from birth to death. I’m not sure there is or is even supposed to be “meaning” to life. It’s something we have thrust upon us and we just have to make the best of it.
The possibilities of finding a career that enables you to say “I love my job” every day, for the rest of your career are remote. I love my job some of the time, and some of the time I wish I was doing something else. I think I’m good and effective and helpful some of the time, and some of the time I think I’m a fraud and am doing my clients no good at all.
What I have learned to do is to try to accept myself where I am, right now, in this moment. That’s not to say that I think people who are constantly unhappy in their careers should just stick with it and be happy with what they’ve got. I’m just saying that there’s no guarantee that even if you were to spend a fortune in money and time examining yourself and your skills, interests, values and all the rest of it, and you come up with what looks like the perfect career change, you will end up any happier than you were before.
Why? Because that’s not what changing careers is about for many people. Changing careers for many people is about the pursuit of a mirage. Something that we think is there, that we have been told is there, but isn’t: ultimate satisfaction. We are told by society, (and coaches are amongst the worst perpetrators of this fiction) that we are entitled to a great career and happiness. We’re not. We’re not entitled to anything.
And I’m not saying don’t bother to try to get out of your job if it makes you miserable, I’m just saying don’t assume that whatever you go to next is going to be your dream job. Your life will not be fundamentally altered by changing career. You’ll still be you, and if you are fundamentally dissatisfied with the life you have, the person you are and the world you are living in, a new job isn’t going to change that.
If, on the other hand, you can accept who you are, with your weaknesses, failings, limitations, and celebrate your strengths, successes and potential, then maybe a career change will give you that small bit of improvement that makes some, if not all of the difference.
That’s where a career coach can help. If on the other hand, you recognise that your dissatisfaction is altogether more fundamental, then maybe counselling is a better option?
Nick Gendler 
Wise words, Nick, thank you.
Like it Nick! Honest and true. Simple.
I am not sure that life is a very linear journey from birth to death. I think visualising it that way actually creates additional emphasis and expectations. Life is a series of experiences, some of which we learn from, some of which we enjoy, some of which we hate, some of which are boring etc. On the day we are born we do not know when we will die.
Birth and death are binary. The light is on or it’s off. Thinking of it as linear creates expectation (of progress ) and a sense of time running out, hardly living ‘in the moment’ at all. Have a look at ‘The Idea of Progress’ by E.H. Carr. It shows how the concept of history as some sort of cumulative development is actually a very recent construct and highly related to the rational, scientific world.