How to Reignite Your Drive When the Role Starts Feeling Stale

"I want to do something I am passionate about" – A simple thinking framework to help you brainstorm the answer to this challenge.

Last week I was working with a client who wanted to leave the Tourist Hospitality business after 12 years. She felt she had lost her passion for service but had no clear sense of where to go next, and had no appetite to start from the bottom rung of the ladder. The uncertainty was becoming overwhelming and stressful because she could not work out what she could do, and she worried that the hollow feeling she had went beyond needing a new job. Her kids had left home and her family was financially comfortable, so this was not about money. The gap was wanting to feel like she was making a difference, or living her passion.

*There are relatively few disciplines where you need to start completely over if you change careers, although I am amazed at how many people believe you do.

I found this challenge compelling because my client wanted support to reignite her "jump out of bed raring to go" feeling, as she put it. Many people rush to start applying for roles and skip the mindset work entirely. That work is the moment that connects people with the most rewarding careers they will have. In the Career Max programme, this is where we dig into what you want and then design the plan to go and get it.

After talking through her responsibilities and the things she had delivered over the years that she was proud of, we had a long list of tasks, but nothing that connected for her at a personal level. I wanted to try something different. I have been using this model for a while and it gives people a new perspective on what they enjoy about life and the people they surround themselves with. That is a different exercise from scanning a position description and picking companies off a job board based on name recognition.

Connecting with your passion tends to need some structure, a box to think within. In this case, circles. We spent about 15 to 20 minutes brainstorming answers to the questions in the circles below. I could see the light come into her eyes as she talked, and her passion for certain things came through clearly as she recalled them. She was in full flow. My job as a coach is to take the clues from the past and help link them to a role in the future. Once we had the list, I gave her a summary of what I had heard and we set about researching companies, causes and options that could offer her what she was looking for.

Here is what to do:

1. Grab a pen and paper and start brainstorming ideas related to the headings in the three circles. The questions are examples only – use the titles as your guide. "Favourite things" could apply to anything you like spending time on.
2. Once you have three to five bullet points for each circle heading, note down why each one excites you.
3. Then write two or three words that summarise all the points in one particular circle.
4. Next, imagine yourself in a helicopter hovering 200 metres in the air and look across all the lists, pulling out commonalities between two circles or across all three. For example, you might find "current events" appearing in both favourite things and constants because you read the newspaper every morning, enjoy talking politics and like keeping up with what is happening in the world. That could point you towards fast-moving contemporary organisations. You might see "giving back" running across all three circles, which could point you towards cause-driven organisations or not-for-profits, as it did for my client.
5. Finally, turn that self-reflection into action. Search for opportunities using thematic words from your lists, or variations of those words, as company values, parts of job advertisements or quotes in media articles.

Note – It doesn’t matter whether you recreate the three circles or make three lists. What matters is that you can identify your passion and the things you love.

In the end, my client identified that volunteering would allow her to express her passion and give her a reason to bounce out of bed that went beyond service for wages or tips. She did not need to change careers at all. It was a matter of refocusing her mindset and strategy on how she approached her day-to-day.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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