"I HATE MY JOB"

Today FM: If I may turn now to Rowan Manahan of Fortify Services. Rowan is going to talk to us about those people who hate their jobs. I was reading the other day that in Britain 270,000 people per day take time out because they are stressed, so if we were to pro rata that for here it would be ... 20,000+ people absenting themselves because of stress. Are there really that many people out there who hate their jobs?

Fortify: Good morning Conal. Let me first say that stress leave can occur for a multitude of reasons, but to answer your question, an awful lot of people do hate their jobs, a significant number of people find themselves in the 'golden handcuffs' cliché and a large part of the reason for that is the societal pressure, the family pressure, the scholastic pressure - you demonstrate an aptitude for a certain set of subjects at second level and the system starts (gently or otherwise) shoe-horning you in that direction; you come to a certain level in that and, for whatever reason, you find that you are not deriving satisfaction from it any more.

To use a Venn diagram model on that, we would advocate that in order for somebody to be fully happy in the work that they do there need to be 3 concentric circles: the circle of Enjoyment (you like what you do), the circle of Skill (you're good at what you do and it is valuable to the marketplace), and the circle of Financial Reward (so that you are being adequately paid for this work). If one of those circles falls out of kilter the result is a stressed-out, unhappy puppy.

Today FM: And what do you do? I'm thinking of one person I met recently, who was in this situation. He was a doctor, a very good doctor, and after 20-odd years of practice, he found out that he HATED being a doctor and would do anything else. What do you do? You're not trained to do anything else in particular?

Fortify: Start reading and thinking - there are endless tomes written on the subject of transferring or transitioning into a new career and clearly, the key things you need to identify are:

	What is it that is making you unhappy?
	What is it that, conversely, makes you very happy on the job?
	What do you have in your skillset that is (a) something you are genuinely skillful at and (b) is enjoyable for you and therefore that you will want to bring with you in your suitcase to the new job?
	Finally, balance this thinking off with "what will the market permit me to do?"

Today FM: Well that's a different issue. And isn't that the real issue eventually? I mean, we'd all love to be paid to sail around the Bahamas or something, but realistically, we can't ...

Fortify: No, of course we all can't. Society and the free market need people to sort the post, and sweep the streets, and serve in McDonalds etc, etc, etc ... Of course we do. And there are certain people who will use these jobs in a transitory way - the 'McJob' as it is now derogatorily referred to - and certain people who will fulfil those functions for a large part of their working lives.

But to go back to first principles on the example you gave, if you are a 30-something or a 40-something who has discovered, "No, I am not enjoying getting out of bed on a Monday morning." Indeed, with many of the clients we would meet, you may be actively stressed out going to bed on Sunday night knowing that the alarm clock is going to ring 8 hours later.

The imperative is to go back to first principles and revisit your thoughts and dreams from earlier in your life. If you think of life in 3 phases - Learning, Earning and Yearning were the three ingredients to a good life that Christopher Morley identified. In the Learning phase, you have no fetters on your thinking, you can do anything that you want. My 4 year-old wants to be a "Princess Ballet Dancer" and good luck to her, I'm sure she's up to the task. At some point, she is probably going to discover, "Oh, I'm not quite good enough to be a Prima Ballerina and hey - Daddy's not a king ..."

Reality will slowly set in and that will typically happen towards the end of the Learning years and heading into those Earning years. What happens in the Earning years is that your overriding concern moves from being fun and happiness and clearing hurdles in terms of exams or what have you; into being very much about getting security going in your life. We're onto Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs here, but I would spell that 'security' with a dollar sign instead of an 'S' at the beginning - because, as you rightly identify, for most people that's what it's all about.

You were talking earlier on in the programme about the cost of purchasing a home in this nation of ours. Any level-headed person coming out of the education system now is thinking, "How on earth am I going to be able to buy so much as a telephone booth in the greater Dublin area?" And when you run up against reality, when those constraints start dropping into place, people lose sight of their dreams. It's not really about "What is it I really like to do?" It's more about "What the hell can I generate the maximum income by doing? Even if it ends up making me sick to my stomach ..."

Today FM: Now you're talking about selling your soul and I did promise at the top of the programme that we would investigate how to move on if people hate their jobs. I'm not hearing an answer here ...

Fortify: Sure, all we've talked about so far is root cause. The route out is deceptively simple. The route out is a period of self-evaluation, followed by a period of consultation - with friends, family, peers and perhaps experts on the subject. You take your car to a garage if it's not running smoothly, many people now take their careers along for a health check every now and then. On that basis, you sit down and determine a narrow number of routes - those that you are going to be able to go and those that you are going to be willing to go. And at that stage, still deceptively simple, you are drawing lines down the middle of pages - "Where am I going to go next and how am I going to get there?"

Most people have this information in their heads. Any self-aware person knows what they like, what they hate and what their lines in the sand are. The harsh reality for most people is the financial constraint which precludes them doing what they really want ...

Today FM: ... Which is mortgage, family, bills and all that. Right. Let us say that there's somebody lying in bed listening to us this morning and they have the house and the family and so on. Realistically they can't change, can they?

Fortify: Of course they can change. The question is, how drastic a change can they make and in what timeframe? If you are a Landscape Gardener now and you want to be an Astronaut. OK - that's a big leap of faith for NASA to take if they hire you. But if you are planning to attain the Astronaut role in 10 years' time, if you make a plan that that is where you want to go in life, well then you are talking about taking a succession of planned, baby steps to get there. What the majority of people do is they drift through life with no long-term planning horizon. I think the education system engenders that in us - it's a security blanket for most people based on a series of short-term horizons.

Today FM: Do the kind of people who have long-term plans not freak you out Rowan? I worry when I meet people who say they want to run say, NASA, in 10 years' time.

Fortify: Well, the studies conducted in the Ivy League universities in the States in the 1950s and 60s indicated that the very small proportion of people who do run their life to a long-term plan (about 3% of the population are 'gifted' in this way) tended to succeed at a very high level. Given that this was America in the 1950s, the measure of success used was wealth and that 3% accumulated more than three quarters of the wealth of the total study group. 75% of the money flowing into the hands of the 3% who had a long-term plan - and these were not inheriting their money. There were no silver spoons in the mouth - they were excluded from the studies.

Today FM: So the mistake I made was not being absolutely driven back about 25 years ago - I didn't think this all out, did I?

Fortify: You didn't even write it on the back of an envelope, did you Conal?

Today FM: So for the rest of us mere mortals, in the face of these driven 3%, we take our baby steps. But aren't there those people out there who, no matter what they want to do, are going to find themselves unhappy in their working lives?

Fortify: These people are technically referred to as 'Grumblers'. They are a very small percentage of the population and typically, Grumblers are people of very high intelligence, very low boredom threshold, who have a great deal of insight and find the political jostling for position and the in-fighting that occurs in most organisations to be, basically, beneath them. And they find themselves unhappy as a result.

Today FM: Rowan, that's all the time we have this morning. Thank you very much for talking to us and I think I'll go off now and write my career plan ... That's Rowan Manahan of Fortify Services.

Fortify: Thank you Conal, nice to talk to you.