Why unemployment might be just what you need to up-level your life

1.3 million Australians lost their job during the height of the Covid19 pandemic. Many have regained work, but around 600,000 of those impacted remain unemployed. A further 450,000 people in Victoria alone could join them due to stage four lockdowns

Unrelated to Covid19, I too have been unemployed for most of this year. While it’s daunting not knowing where the next pay cheque is coming from, the opportunity to press pause, take stock and consider the future has been incredibly rewarding.

For more than a decade, I’ve been living a life driven almost entirely by extrinsic motivation, the opinion of others and chance. I was professionally unfulfilled, which was harming other areas of my life. I didn’t recognise the person I’d become, nor did I enjoy the life I was leading. After leaving Adobe in December 2019, I was determined to find a vocation which was authentically me. Unemployment was my opportunity to begin a new chapter, both professionally and personally.

My experience over the last eight months has been tumultuous and taught me many lessons. I’ve decided to share some of what I’ve learned, in the hope I might inspire others to contemplate their life, strive for better and share their stories too.

While I haven’t yet found the ideal role, I am clear on what I want from my future career and what I have to offer in return. What follows are the top five lessons that have helped me reach that clarity, and provided me with a framework for continued personal growth. I hope you find them helpful.

Lesson 1: Fulfillment from extrinsic motivation is short-lived

Over the past ten years, I’ve been very fortunate to work for some of the most successful technology businesses in the world. In that time, I changed employer four times either because my ego sought a promotion or because I discovered peers were earning more than I was. Career progression and increased compensation had become the sole motivation for every professional decision I made.

This presented a challenge. The afterglow of the promotion and a bigger salary wears off quickly and once the novelty of the new employer is replaced by the day to day operational grind, reality strikes. The search begins for something else to provide fulfilment: cue the new car, a bigger house, designer handbags and eventually the need for the next promotion or raise.

Shortly after each move, I was deeply unsatisfied and disengaged — as is the case for the majority of the Australian workforce. I had fundamentally lost connection with what I enjoyed about working and with what I was good at doing. It was a daily struggle to find enjoyment in the otherwise mundane slog of corporate life.

It became clear that unless I found alternative sources of motivation, I was destined to have an unfulfilling and unhappy career.

Lesson 2: Intrinsic motivation is potent and sustainable

Fortunately, there are things other than a salary or a job title that can provide fulfilment. You just have to know where to look.

There are moments in life when everything just clicks. You are at the top of your game, and in complete control, everything feels natural and effortless. It may be when you are presenting to an audience, composing at the piano, writing, coding or even collaborating with others. Whenever it happens, you feel noticeably different, enjoyment skyrockets, and so does your performance. I’m sure you can recall the least one such experience in the last year.

Unfortunately, most of us miss the critical message contained in the euphoria of these moments. We bask briefly in the exhilaration then quickly reject the possibility that it could be the norm rather than an exception.Instead, we revert to the tedious standard procedures of compliance we’re encouraged to follow.

I am as guilty as the next person. I regularly reminisce about three particular times when I felt superhuman. In one example, I effortlessly captivated a customer executive team for four hours without a break. In another, I suddenly had access to information and insights which, to this day, I don’t know where they originated. In the third, I sat down to write an article one morning and the next thing I knew it was time for bed. I’d fluently distilled many complex ideas into the best piece of writing I had ever produced. I was sitting at the keyboard, but it felt like someone or something else was pressing the keys. I value the reward of these experiences over any competitive win, promotion or positive feedback from a manager. They are my favourite professional anecdotes, but I had never thought to learn from them, until now.

If you haven’t read Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, I thoroughly recommend you do. It helped me understand what I had been experiencing had a name: flow. I discovered that flow is a scientifically proven natural phenomenon of the human body that it’s highly pleasurable, addictive and which you can be recreate reliably. Flow is what’s is called an intrinsic motivator, and a powerful one at that.

Intrinsic motivation refers to engaging in activities because those activities are personally rewarding. By learning to harness flow and the associated feeling of ecstasy in almost any activity, I no longer need to rely on the extrinsic motivators which had previously proven so ineffective.

I’ll write about how I get into flow in the future, but happy to chat about it if anyone is interested before I manage to do so. Just drop me a message, and we can schedule a time to talk.

Lesson 3: Your innate strengths are your superpower

Of course, harnessing flow is no small feat. However, when I play to my strengths, flow experiences are far more frequent.

I’ve spent much of my career avoiding the truth about what I am naturally good at, in favour of demonstrating I’m capable of what will secure the next big promotion. This is a tiring and incredibly stressful existence.

I’ve realised that for as long as I can remember, I’ve simultaneously held two jobs. The job I was employed to do, and the second job of convincing everyone I was capable of doing it. The combined stress and anxiety of both roles was proportionate to how much I was leveraging skills other than my innate strengths. You might have previously heard this experience referred to as imposter syndrome.

I was always capable of doing my primary job. It just took more effort than it should have. Or perhaps would have, if alignment existed between the roles and my natural strengths. In the absence of strength-to-role alignment, my typical behaviour was to overcompensate in job number two. My ego certainly wouldn’t want someone to think I wasn’t a complete natural at the job I was hired to do.

Under this kind of pressure, nobody does their best work, and they certainly don’t access optimal experiences like flow. Instead, they look outside their core role for opportunities to harness their strengths and find enjoyment. They are thus adding more responsibility, more pressure and reducing their capacity to deliver upon their core objectives. It’s an almost inescapable vicious cycle — only becoming unemployed allowed me off the wheel.

As a remedy, I’ve spent time identifying, understanding and embracing my strengths. I’ve learned the best approach is, to be honest about them with myself and others when discussing future opportunities. It’s refreshing how positively potential employers respond when you provide a new perspective on how your strengths will benefit their organisation.

I’ve also identified areas of weakness from past experience, which are becoming crucial future professional capabilities, and invested in developing them into personal strengths.

Lesson 4: The labels we use unnecessarily confine us

To make sense of the increasingly complex and noisy world we live in today, we’ve become accustomed to labelling and compartmentalising our life. “Work” is one of the most insidious and happiness-impairing labels we use today.

For many, including me, work (school work and professional work) has developed negative connotations. It’s stressful and tedious but necessary to generate an income — something we are to suffer such that we can enjoy other aspects of life. We struggle to observe any positive contribution work makes to our lived experience and frown upon its regular interruption of life.

What’s more, the activities we associate with work are, by association, afflicted by the same unfavourable sentiment. I had developed a particular aversion to learning and writing for this reason. Unconscious programming was causing me to avoid both activities at all costs and restricting me from the possibility of rewarding experiences and personal development.

By recognising neither interest is exclusively synonymous with work, I have found a renewed passion for both. Writing articles and journaling has become a tool for bringing clarity to whatever is on my mind, both personally and professionally. I’ve begun enjoying the experience of learning and the joyous feeling of absorption in the study of a new subject. I have discovered two new hobbies and ‘work’ just became a rewarding experience offering a world of possibility for my own growth.

Not only that, but I have realised work isn’t inherently negative at all. In fact, the struggle of work is a necessity for fulfilment. Consciously designed into life, work can be one of the most significant contributors to our personal development. Work-life balance shouldn’t be viewed as the proportionate distribution of hours between work and non-work life. Instead, we must strive for an integrated experience of both where each positively reinforces the other towards increasingly rewarding experiences and growth.

Lesson 5: Psychological and societal distractions hijack our focus

I have always had an uncomfortable nagging sensation. A constant inner voice, reminding me I didn’t know how I was spending my money or if I had adequate savings to survive an unforeseen emergency.

As I am finding out now, I am financially safe. However, it transpires I have been somewhat wasteful. Prompted by my sudden lack of income, I was forced to consider personal budgeting for the first time in my life. Tracking outgoings when you don’t have any incomings quickly highlights unnecessary spending. Budgeting has become an enjoyable game that I look forward to playing every week. How frugally can I live the life I want? Where can I make incremental savings?

While valuable, this lesson isn’t about budgeting. It’s about what creating a budget made me consider. I quickly began to reflect on what I actually needed and wanted in my life. I discovered that desiring then buying things provided only momentary happiness. Possessions actually brought me very little joy. I was a slave to consumerism and was using the thrill to distract myself and avoid other parts of life which needed attention.

I now know what it costs to live the life I want to lead, and exactly how long my savings will last before I need a new source of income. I only spend money on necessities or things I genuinely want in my life.

I no longer worry about money. The daily distraction of the nagging inner bank manager is gone. I’m no longer hijacked by consumer marketing. I am better able to focus and continually searching for other causes of disruption to eliminate in the future.

By eliminating distractions, becoming aware of irrational unconscious behaviours and harnessing intrinsic motivation, I have regained control of my life. For the first time in years, I am excited about the future and by my potential.

I now have a five-question framework that I use when approaching a task, problem or opportunity to decide if it’s worth doing and to ensure I am on the right track:

1. Is there intrinsic motivation for doing this?

2. If not, can I find or create it?

3. How would I approach this using my strengths?

4. Am I constraining my thinking because of a societal label or structure?

5. Is anything distracting my focus, and can I eliminate it forever?