Professional, Do Your Boots Fit?
Hiking boots are funny things– correctly chosen and broken in, they allow you effortlessly to hike for miles and miles and climb the roughest terrain. But just try to hike in ill-fitting or stiff boots right out of the box, and you’ll soon be whimpering your way back to your starting point.
Our careers are like that. As you look around at colleagues, you see some who can’t wait to get to work in the morning, can’t shut up about their subject matter, and just seem to be energized by doing the very thing that people pay them well to do. These people just seem so lucky, and we all envy them.
But there are so many others who go to work because they have to. They live for weekends and holidays when they can escape to do the things they really want to do. If they have friends at work, they’re mostly bitching buddies with whom they share their woes. Retirement can’t come soon enough.
Interestingly enough, the first group seem to have all the great clients, people and organizations who appreciate what you do for them and are happy to pay a very fair price for it. On the other hand, the second group and their clients are more like adversaries, grudging each other their time and resources, rarely satisfied, and resembling unhappy spouses stuck in a bad marriage.
The happy ones typically are enthusiastic supporters of their professional associations and gladly pour themselves into the betterment of the profession and the moulding of new entrants. The unhappy ones don’t understand why you would waste your precious spare time doing these things.
The happy ones also appear to be lucky with support staff, strong professionals in their own right who also love doing what they do, and also seem to love and enjoy clients just as much as their boss does. The unhappy ones, not so much– persistence turnover, embarrassing screw-ups, hours and hours spent patching it up with unhappy clients.
For whatever reason, professional errors and omissions insurers seem to love the happy professionals, but get most of their grief from the unhappy ones. Funny, that!
Of course you know where this discussion is going– the happy ones are those who are in alignment, that is, they are living out their exact giftedness for the benefit of grateful clients whose needs exactly match the professional’s offerings. The unhappy professional, on the other hand, is just going to work, performing activities for which she or he may be trained, but for which she or he is not particularly apt, delivering so-so output to clients who, feeling cheated, are ungrateful and dissatisfied, and in the worst cases, troublemakers.
Aligned professionals don’t really go to work– they spend their days having fun, and the recognition and high compensation are just fringe benefits. Misaligned professionals, on the other hand, feel enslaved, underappreciated, unfulfilled, and angry. Not surprisingly, their clients feel more or less the same.
Which are you?
(Excerpt from The Alignment Doctrine)