How will I be in my place? The importance of career awareness in our lives

In this article we will consider what it means to be in my place.

For which period of your life, for which moment of your life could you say that you are in your place or you were in your place in the past. If you have experienced that feeling once, that is great, because it gives you a positive example of what you want in the present. You know what you are looking for.

If the answer is no, how will you know when you are in the right place?

Being in my place means I don’t want to be anywhere else. In terms of the labour market approach, we say that it is good for m where I am now, I don’t want to go anywhere else. I don’t want to be anywhere else and I don’t want to be any other time. I you are 28 years old, you don’t want to be 33 or 40 and you don’t want to be 21 again. If I’m in my place, I’m living without arrears. Our arrears and debt often limit us because it pulls us back. It shows up when you think “I should have moved on”, ‘I should have been more courageous in my career choices” and so on. If someone has no arrears or has as little as possible, he lives in his own identity, looks towards the present with a healthy future orientation. Being in my place also means I don’t want to be with anyone else. I mean, I don’t want another boss, other colleagues or another profession.

Where are you now?

• Are you planning a career correction? Your basic career choice if fine, you would rather adjust it a little.
• Are you in a repeated career choice? - you are longing to leave where you are, what you are doing.
• Do you want a career change?
• None, but you are looking for a place in the labour market. You have qualifications, you have experience.

After answering the above questions, it is worthwhile to consider whether you are passive to change or active in your own life. We can ask ourselves, how does it manifest itself in everyday life when someone is not in his place. A person who is not in his place complains, explains himself and makes excuses. But with this attitude it is hard to control our own destiny, because less complaining, more action leads to results.

There are many types of labour market presence, which are reflected in your relationship with the company:

• Are you “in” type? Do you work in a company? This is the type who wears a company shirt out of obligation. They are connected, the relationship with the company is important for them. They are the ones who compile the music list for the company Christmas party in their free time.
• Are you “at” type? Do you work at a company? This is the type who is not connected, they have an “I belong somewhere” feeling. They attend the company Christmas party if it’s on Friday, but they’ll be busy on Saturday.
• Are you a “for” type? Do you work for a company? They are the ones who rarely show up at a Christmas party. For them, the company is a workplace. They does not want to be tied to or belong to any company.

If I give the same answer the question “in, at, for” as my organizational culture, then I will experience in everyday life that I am at my place. It is worth finding your own inner attitude, which will guide you in your next steps.

It is also worth looking at whether it is good to experience the rhythm of your daily life or whether it feels like it’s just a rush. The cultural space provides a non-material response to the challenges of the material world. If you want to be in the right place and look for all the little ingredients, then you should read the poem of Dezső Kosztolányi: Happy sad song. A lot of people get almost sick of looking for the perfect job, moving up the career ladder, without saying, “Thank you, that’s enough.” The lines of the poem suggest that after many, many years of hard work, it’s nice to have a presence in the job market, when you feel your own strength and you have a choice.

It is worth looking for the answer to the question, what is the inner value system that is pushing you so far that it almost pushes you into your place. You cannot not be in your place because you are yourself all the time.

How can you test if you are in your place? If a large transfer arrives on your account, e.g. 500 million forints, what would you do the next day? If someone is working and the answer is that I’m definitely not going in tomorrow, then you can know that he is not in his place. If the answer is that I would actually do the same thing, just refining it a little bit, then he is in his place.

In his TED talk entitled Start with Why Simon Sinek says: people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. We are trying to figure out what the inner why is, why your eyes are shining, why it’s good to go in on a Monday. Is there an employer that’s worth going in for, that you feel that way about, or maybe you should be self-employed? If you are going to start a business, the question is, when is the right time to start? The answer is there’s no right time. It’s more about what is working inside of you? The parental narrative is very powerful. For example, in your family, what vocabulary did your parents use, what adjectives did they use to refer to self-employed people, was there a positive or a negative perception of being a self-employed?

But why do you start a business? To free yourself because you’re tired of working 60 hours a week. But if your parents’ narrative is that a normal person works at least 40 hours a week, then you’re going to feel guilty about working 25 hours a week (which makes a decent living). What are you going to do about it on the surface? You start working more, e.g. setting up a new site. So, we’re trapped in our own patterns. Being on your place is sometimes better achieved as a self-employed, but most of us are blocked from realizing it. It is worth clarifying your answer to this question.

I also need to figure out what life and the job market are dealing me. If we wait for life to hand out two aces – like in poker – then it will surely pass us by. Jean Paul Sartre says that you have no control over what misfortune you’re born with, but you do have influence over whether you try to make something out of it. You face your own conflicts and count on your own misfortune-coefficient and say that despite this, I am doing for my own future.

What can be done for our own future?

There is different attitude to time. Someone who is not in his place is typically present fatalistic and past negative life attitudes. What time attitude is worth choosing to put me in my place? By choosing a future-oriented attitude, that’s what career awareness is. In my present there will always be a hint of future orientation. My daily life is guided by where I want to go. There are two logical ways to do this. One is the logic of our parents: see what you’re good at, what talents you have, see where you come from, make an inventory, and make a better future out of it. In this case, we build the future from the present. Another approach is very different. I look back at my current present from a more distant future moment. From a career management point of view, looking ahead to a period of five to ten years is relevant. Complete this sentence: I would like to live a life (in terms of lifestyle, rhythm of life) in 2033 that…; what kind of person do I want to be in 10 years, who do I want to become? If you have answers to these two questions, write them down on an A4 sheet. Think of it as a list being fulfilled and you have to build the present from the future. What do you need to do today to reach the goals listed on sheet A4? The logic of “from the future to the present” provides us with something to hold on to in everyday life and is a point of orientation in our decisions. Which job to apply for, which position to accept in relation to your orientation point, which professional environment should you connect with.

In order to be in your place, you need to be present in the labour market with a partnership mindset, not as they are the big ones and I am the small one, and what can I do against the big ones. The partnership approach says that the power relations are 49/51. That kind of attitude requires a certain kind of self-confidence. It is possible to say “no” and many people can, but they don’t dare.

In order to be in my place and have self-confidence, my transformable knowledge should not be underestimated. How can I use the knowledge I’ve acquired in the past in my new field in case of career correction or career change? What other perspective can I bring to it so that it becomes a resource and value and I don’t feel like I’ve wasted 10 years of my life. But at the same time failure is part of an authentic life, even if it is no longer part of normality, because everybody wants to do well all the time. In the state of being in my place such a quality of life can be created where you are not always doing well and you are still in your place. Psychic functioning likes if someone can remain self-identified with his own inner value system, it will lead to me being in my place. How? In case of a decision dilemma, I choose the worse decision, but that decision is self-identical, so it is me. When it comes to decisions, there is no way that all areas of life (work, finance, physical environment, hobbies, relationship, friends, family, spirituality, health) will go well. I can project into the areas of life the approach of not wanting to be anywhere else, anytime and with anyone else. After that, let’s see how many areas I am in my place. If one part of my life is not right, then let’s not let it negatively affect the other areas of my life that are. For example, if I don’t have a good job, don’t say that my life is a mess. In case of a bad job, my friendships, my health etc. are still okay.

+1 tip for change: expose your life to ideas you have never thought of before.