Resolution 5 has me thinking

It’s hard for me to put into words exactly what I am thinking and feeling at the moment. Perhaps I should try to look at things more objectively than I sometimes do. It’s hard to quantify the feeling of dissatisfaction that I have with work. I enjoy it when I’m troubleshooting, when things go wrong and I have to weigh up the different options and then pick the best course of action for the circumstances.
My current manager (not the one mentioned yesterday) has suggested that one way of thinking about what it is that I enjoy about my job could be to imagine what I would do if I won the lottery.
Obviously I would spend a few days doing as little as possible, and take a holiday somewhere warm. But then what would I do? I am fairly sure that I would be very bored just hanging around at home.

I could write about how I’d set up a knitter’s holiday retreat, or something like that. How I’d have a dying studio and a small fibre farm. How there’d be a small rescue centre for unwanted animals. How we would keep chickens (and possibly livestock) and have vegetable beds and fruit trees. I would have a really energy efficient house, insulated with British fleece insulation and with a wood burning stove.

But you see, that isn’t the point of the question. The point of the question is to see what you enjoy doing enough to do it even if you weren’t paid for it. This is because if you change career, there’s a good chance that you’ll change salary, and probably for a lower salary.

So, in order to achieve the new job resolution, I need to clarify in my mind what it is that I want to do. Leaving a job because you don’t want to be there any more is one thing, but leaving a job because you’ve found another one that you really want to do is quite something else. I know that I want to do something interesting to me, something where I can be creative and where I can make an impact.

I’m finding Eliza’s blog interesting, she is very good at expressing herself. She posts pictures which really emphasise what she means. Sometimes she devolves into long and convoluted posts, and I know how she feels! (I simply don’t post those ones, often… today is different)

I want different. I need something new, a challenge. I want to get home from work and think “yeah, I achieved something today” instead of “thank goodness that’s over. Oh no! Only 15 hours and I have to go back!” (and that’s on a day when I leave on time!). I want to wake up in the morning and get up, not snooze for an hour because I can’t face going to work. I want to have something to do every day that isn’t a wishy-washy “think of how to improve the team” type thing. I want to *want* to cut my lunch-break short, not wonder if anyone will notice if I knit just one more round before I go back.

I have to push myself to do this. The path of least resistance is to simply stay put. Don’t find a new job; just keep plodding away in the current one. But I’ve been plodding – no, that’s not true. I worked my ass off for a while, when I had a goal, when I cared about what I was doing. But now I feel like I’m plodding, or even trudging. And it is simply taking me closer to being back in the same old structure as before with a manager that I know I can’t stand.

I’ve just deleted a big whinge about that manager. The only person I’ve really talked to about this is OH, and I don’t know that it’s appropriate for the blog. Using my usual benchmark, I wouldn’t go and stand in the middle of Tesco and shout out some of what I wrote, so it’s gone. Suffice to say that I obviously either haven’t made it clear enough to those in charge, they don’t believe me, or perhaps they don’t believe I’ll go. I suspect that I wouldn’t really be missed though. It could all be worked around.

So all I have to do is: decide what I want to do (is it the same as now, is it different), roughly where I’d like to be (which could be York, but probably isn’t any more, even though it is a lovely city), and then go and get it, the new job, new house (if the job isn’t in York), everything.
Scary? Maybe a little.