Living the dream

By Melanie Aley

I recently listened to one of my favourite podcasts*, and the host was talking with Simone Stolzoff about his new book, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. Simone really encourages listeners to stop placing so much of their self-worth on their work and to stop chasing the dream job, and instead consider whether our jobs are “good enough”. He goes on to explain that it is highly unlikely that any job is ever going to be ideal, and so we should think holistically about what we want out of life, and what aspects of our career or job are most important to us.

Listening to Simone talk about the idea of a “good enough” job reminded me of one of the key concepts I learned when I was studying career development, and one I like to remind myself and others about often. Your career does not exist in isolation from the rest of your life. The Systems Theory Framework of Career Development1 provides a wonderful tool for people to consider the range of individual, social, environmental and societal impacts on their careers. At an individual level, our knowledge, skills, attitudes, interests and values as well as personal characteristics such as gender, health, disability and ethnicity, all impact the career choices we make. Beyond ourselves, our environment and society also influence our careers, and this might include our geographical location, peers, the employment market, socioeconomic status, family, media, politics, and historical trends. A common example of this is how our geographical location and having a family with school-aged children can influence job opportunities available to you or that you are willing to pursue. The Framework also considers how you and your circumstances might change over time. For instance, a job that seemed like your dream job five years ago, may not be your dream job today, and that’s okay.

The point is…. if you are striving for a happy, meaningful life (who isn’t?) we can’t just focus on our careers in isolation from our life. There is so much of our identity that impacts the career choices we make, which makes it near impossible to find what we might consider being our dream job. Then, when we aren’t ‘living the dream’ at work, we can get frustrated or demotivated, struggling to know where to take our career. What we should try to remember is that there might be enough about the job that is ‘good’ and allow you to live your best life. Does your job provide financial security, so that you can pay your mortgage, eat out at restaurants, go on overseas vacations (or fund any activity that fulfils you)? Does your job have flexible hours, which allows you to pick your children up from school? Are there parts of your job that are meaningful, that you get great satisfaction from? Thinking about whether our work supports us in having a meaningful life in a more holistic way can help us overcome the frustrations of not having the ‘perfect’ job.

If we have a ‘good enough’ job, one of the strategies we can employ to try and improve our job satisfaction is job crafting. Job crafting is “the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work”2. There are three potential avenues for job crafting. Firstly, you can look at task crafting –here you might look at what tasks in your job you find interesting and do more of those (and less of the ones you don’t like), or increase or decrease the responsibilities you have. Secondly, you can examine your workplace relationships, and change up who you work with on different tasks, or maybe look at creating new relationships through mentoring. Finally, we can shift our mindset, which might involve focusing on the importance of our work or the positive impact it has on others. This last one is one we can all utilise in our oral health careers. It can be so easy to focus on the repetitive nature of scaling teeth as clinicians, or the million emails as an academic, but remembering our work has such a positive impact on our patients and students can shift our perspective and remind us our work is meaningful.

Footnotes: * The Happiness Lab with Dr Laurie Santos – listen through Spotify or Apple Podcasts; 1 Patton, W., & McMahon, M. (2006). A Systems Theory Framework of Career Development. In Career Development and Systems Theory (pp. 195-224). Brill; 2 Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179-201.

Dr Melanie Aley (nee Hayes) is a dental hygienist who has enjoyed a diverse career in clinical practice, teaching, research and management. She has a Masters of Education majoring in Career Development, and after working in multidisciplinary roles, is now an Associate Professor and the Bachelor of Oral Health Program Director at the University of Sydney.