Wage Slave

How do you feel about Monday mornings? Does Sunday night leave you filled with dread, mourning the end of a weekend of joy and freedom, or can you go to bed on Sunday night looking forward to the energizing challenges waiting for you in the morning?

Far too many of us are wage slaves. Even professionals – in fact, perhaps particularly professionals. What was meant to be an honourable and fulfilling calling somehow got transformed into “a job”. A miserable one at that.

Wrangling with clients about outcomes or payment, interminable partners’ meetings to haggle about compensation, begging the bank for an increase in the line of credit, agonizing over how to deal with an underperforming staff member… These were not part of the dream you had in professional school.

I continue to be staggered by the number of lawyers, accountants, doctors, realtors, and other such self-employed professionals who, after the usual bluff and bravado, confess they hate their jobs. Once they are comfortable enough to speak frankly, the disappointment is bitter and palpable.

Think about it: you were always at or near the top of your class, all the way through high school and undergraduate school. You aced the LSATs or GMATs or whatever, soaked up your professional subject matter like a blotter, and finally gained that magic certification that said you were now allowed to serve in an honourable calling, making the world a better place.

Right. It just didn’t turn out that way. Too much of the work on your desk is tedious, or alternatively you have to accept work about which you feel uncomfortable just to keep the machine running. You see your governing body as an evil tyrant bent on making your life miserable. Weekends and holidays can’t come soon enough, nor last long enough.

What makes it worse is that some of your colleagues actually seem to be having fun, and they also seem to be the ones who earn the most. Even more galling is knowing that you had outperformed many of them in school. It just isn’t fair, is it?

But if you dig a little deeper you will see that those who welcome Monday mornings and who are thriving financially are those who live in the center of their Giftings. That is, they are doing what they were born to do, exercising their natural talents and aptitudes which have been shaped by their experience, and polished by professional training.

In my coaching I find again and again that the single most important assistance I can give is to help the professional find their own “sweet spot”, the place where they are doing what comes naturally and easily to them, almost invariably something they do better than almost anyone else. After that, it’s mostly fine-tuning and introducing specialized tools to enable them to feel confident and energized. And then Monday mornings look a whole lot better.