Your work puts food on the table, lets you pay your rent or mortgage, buys you your necessities, and gets you things that you’ve saved up for. Going through the daily motions of doing what’s on schedule and ending the day to go home and recharge for another day of work can fill you with either excitement or dread. Just how do you know when you’re still happy and productive? How can you tell that it’s time to start doing something else? Well, career books will show you a lot of different signs, but in the end, experts tend to agree on the following indication when the time is right to shift in another direction.
“It doesn’t matter where you are, you are nowhere compared to where you can go.” —Bob Proctor
You reach a stage where you feel that your pay no matter how sufficient, no longer gives you satisfaction.
You do your job well and get paid just right (or more than enough), but when you search your feelings, you realize that there’s something lacking that you just couldn’t put your finger on. Once you reach this stage, you can re-assess your priorities and make an inventory of your skills and abilities. Chances are, you’d discover that you can do much more with the potential of earning just a bit more.
You feel tired and stressed out even on your rest days
Even after unwinding with friends or soaking yourself up in a nice, warm bath, you feel your tiredness disappear momentarily but soon keeps creeping back before hitting the sack. The exhaustion is not merely mental and emotional, but if left unchecked, could affect your body physically — hyperacidity, tension headaches, muscle soreness, dandruff episodes, and the list goes on. No matter how professionally and financially fulfilling your work is, know your limits and when to say stop.
You have that nagging voice telling you that you should be somewhere else doing something else.
Every person has both God-given and self-developed talents. You use your skills and talents to do your job, and you get rewarded in return. But more often than not, a person would get to that point where he’d ask himself, “Is this still what I want to do in the coming months/years?” “Can I do something better?” Sure, there are complacent people who may refuse to change their path because they’re scared of what’s out there, but those who care enough to venture into the unknown could very well be on the road to greater opportunities.
You realize that your skills, abilities, and tasks are not you at all.
Could be that you are really great at what you do, but deep down, you’re scared stiff and experience a lot of tension each time you put your skills to work. You don’t want people to know that you struggle to keep it together because after all, you get things done and people look up to you. So what if you see yourself in this dilemma?
There’s still a way out through exploring and identifying the areas that you’re good at and start capitalizing on these alone. Stay away from work that could bring out only the worst in you because your talents are not cut out for it.
