When you start to get in touch with your Disquiet, you may feel the heaviness of dissatisfaction with how your life is not going the way you want. You want it to change. But change to what? You know what you don’t want, but what do you really want? It’s a tough question.

When I coach a man with Disquiet, one of the biggest chunks of work is getting clarity on what he wants. I don’t mean general goals or just a desire for a more satisfying life. What I mean are specific goals. This can be really hard for someone to identify for themselves without some outside help.

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I found a lot of great resources this week around career issues. This is a main source of Disquiet for many. A lot of my clients have learned that their Disquiet is a call for change - either the relationship they have with their current job or moving into a new career. Here is some help.

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I am sitting in a computer room on break from leading training for a program that fast-tracks high potential grad school graduates into management positions in the federal government. I’m a faculty member for a 3-day intensive leadership program for them.

We had a great discussion today as we explored the challenges of working with cynicism and resignation in the workplace. These are young, very intelligent, immensely talented, energetic and idealistic people. As they move into their new roles, they sometimes get stopped in their tracks as they get exposed to the [tags]cynicism[/tags] in the workplace.

I listened to their stories of working for zombie bosses or with retired-in-place colleagues. It reminds me of when I have worked with senior leaders trying to lead their organization through change and how they often got stopped in their tracks by the resignation as well. (more…)

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Ever come home from work feeling totally lousy about how the day ended up going?

It started great. You had several fires flare up that you handled skillfully. Your boss beamed and you felt on top of the world.

Then, as the day started winding down, a last minute short-fused tasking came down from on high and your high-flying staffer bungled it. Splat. A colleague blames you for not being there to handle it. One minute you were king of the world, the next you are a complete failure.

How you process this - the self recrimination, second-guessing , or shrugging it off, will depend on how your dad handled such things.

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I saw this by Alexander Kjerulf, AKA the Chief Happiness Officer (CHO), from his blog by the same name. It’s a great article and I think pretty relevant for the discussions here.

Our thinking about the causes of stress is very simlar to how many of us think we can end our Disquiet by changing jobs, marriages or cars. And how it’s believed that much of our stress come from our work. Actually, the stress comes from how we relate to our work, not the work itself.

Alexander and I agree: The key to working with your Disquiet as I talk about it here, and the key to working with your stress, is to look at how you are relating to it. That’s where to look at making changes.

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A key component in men’s Disquiet is the issue around work and career. A man’s sense of well being and being successful as a man is tied to his sense of success in his work. As the baby boomers hit retirement age, we are seeing new ways of entering the second phase of our life. Many are starting second and third careers. There is a great opportunity to create work that is meaningful and rewarding. This is from a great post I read on LifeTwo.com (www.lifetwo.com):

Interesting post at AARP about midlife career changes. If you are going to work until 65, then changing careers at 58 may not make sense as you only have 7 years left of your working life and are likely to take an earnings hit in the new career. You simply might not be able to afford to make the change no matter how much you want to do so.

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