How to Make your Current Job More Satisfying

As the famous Stephen Stills song goes: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Although the song was written about personal relationships, it’s also great advice about how to look at a job you’re not quite ready to leave. So, how can you make your current job as satisfying as possible?

Well, that depends…on your Personality “Temperament.” Because people are different, the very same activity that might make one person deliriously happy might lead another into a deep depression. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to understand how you can derive more pleasure from your work – by going to www.personalitytype.com to take a quick and accurate personality type assessment.

(Note: The assessment will tell you your complete 4-letter Personality Type. To determine your “Temperament” – which is the core of each type – simply look for the letters: SJ, SP, NT and NF. Your type will include these letters).

Traditionalists (Sensor Judgers) need to have clear expectations.

To enjoy your job more, find a project that needs doing and volunteer to lead the effort, seek advice and opinions of colleagues who are different from you, suggest ways your office/company could be run more efficiently, ask your boss and co-workers to be explicit with requests and/or instructions, and/or set up short term goals that you can meet.

Experiencers (Sensor Perceivers) need to enjoy what they’re doing.

To enjoy your work more, look around for projects to volunteer for that would be fun, try to find at least some time to get outside, delegate to others as many routine tasks as you can, volunteer to help run and or participate in recreational or social activities, seek opportunities to use your negotiating skills, consider taking a time-management course, try to build more variety into your daily routine, and/or set short-term, achievable goals.

Conceptualizers (iNntuitive Thinkers) need to be challenged.

To enjoy your job more, seek out professional development opportunities, take courses or attend seminars to expand your expertise and add credentials, find other creative people to brainstorm ideas with, hire competent “detail” people, find a mentor you admire and respect or, mentor another person, and/or develop a “critical friends” group to critique each others’ ideas.

Idealists (iNtuitive Feelers) need to believe in what they’re doing and have meaningful relationships.

To enjoy your job more, create a support group to help people with personal and/or work-related issues, volunteer to do PR for your company or department, try (harder!) to leave your work at the office, consider becoming a trainer or coach in your field of expertise, volunteer to draft your organization’s mission statement, seek out other creative people to bounce things off of, and/or attend conferences or get involved in professional organizations.

In addition to enjoying your work more, implementing some of these suggestions can provide the additional benefit of making you even more valuable to your employer – which can come in very handy should you decide you want or need to stay in this job longer than you planned.

Guest Expert:

Through his ground-breaking book Do What You Are, Paul Tieger changed how career counseling is conducted around the world. The author of five books on Personality type and the preeminent expert in this field, Paul has helped over one million people find career satisfaction and success. On any given day, Do What You Are is the most or second most popular career book on Amazon.com.

Paul is also the creator of PersonalityType.com and the PersonalityType.com Assessment, a quick and accurate instrument which has been validated by over fifty thousand on-line users.