We should think about our careers the way we do our personal relationships, a psychologist says.
Psychologist Dr Tessa West: "Being a yes person is not the way to succeed." Photo: Dr Tess West
We should think about our careers the way we do our personal relationships, psychologist Dr Tessa West from New York University says.
West, a social psychology professor, has a background helping people navigate their personal relationships and sees similarities with the way we view our relationship to work.
"A lot of us have complex relationships with our careers. Maybe we love it, and we hate it at the same time.
"Maybe we feel like our career identifies us, it's who we are as a person, but that doesn't make us happy in the same way that you look at a marriage and think, who am I without this person?" she told RNZ's Afternoons.
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We often look too "structural reasons" to explain why we're disenchanted at work, she said.
"How long our commute is, how much money we're making, the same way that we focus on things like is our house big enough when we're married to someone.
"But often there's a deeper emotional issue going on that we don't really dig into."
The best way to understand why you're unhappy at work is to collect personal data, she said - a "stress test" can be revealing.
"Most of the people I found in the research I did for this book, anticipated stressors that turned out to not be that bad.
"I asked them in the morning, 'what's going to be your biggest stressor', and then in the evening, 'what stressed you out the most?'"
The things that actually stress us came as a surprise to her, she said.
"But what's fascinating is the things that really stress us out at work are routine things that we experience, but we don't tell ourselves they're stressors.
"They're things like having a commute that goes too late, to having your boss put something on your calendar you didn't anticipate."
She identified in her research some of the most common causes of unhappiness at work.
A crisis of identity is high on the list, she said.
"Anyone who's ever worked really hard towards a career, put a lot of time and effort into it, probably a lot of money into getting there, but wakes up in the middle of the night and in terror, thinking to themselves, 'do I really want to do this with the rest of my life?'"
A lot of guilt is involved in this feeling, she said.
"Most of us can relate to this experience, like you no longer recognise the job you fell in love with."
Being stretched "too thin" came up a lot in her research, she said.
"I think we're in this age of busyness right now where we're trained to think that more is more, and we're task-switching constantly."
People she described as "high-status" are tight with their time, she said.
"They say no all the time. Being a yes person is not the way to succeed.
"In fact, more often than not, if your boss is asking you to step in at the last minute and take on an extra role, that work is going to die with them. They are not going to bring this up to their boss during promotion meetings, because it doesn't make them look good."
The notion of a team player has also, she said, "gotten out of control".
"You can be a team player in ways that really effectively help your team, but ask yourself, 'is the work I'm doing something that I can put on my resume, that I can crisply talk about, or is it going to be sort of hidden work that's done behind the scenes?'"
Being a "stepping in" type employee seldom results in advancement, she said.
"Is it the kind of work that actually matters for promotion? Is it the stuff that's going to give me respect and admiration, or is it something that anyone could do given sufficient time? And if the answer is, anyone could really do this, it's kind of busy work, but you're just stepping in at the last minute, then you should probably say no."
Another common cause of angst is being a "runner up" she said, but it is a common experience.
"We're not told how many people who are competitive have gone up for this promotion and landed it. How many times do you need to try to go up before you land it? We only see the success stories. We don't see the failure stories.
"Being a runner up it's pretty common. A lot of us don't get asked out on second dates too. It's okay. It's a pretty normative experience."