Your Needs

Invest in understanding yourself.	Work with a coach or someone who will agree to focus on honesty, openness, and hold your best interests at heart. Explore your goals, values, attitudes, and behavior patterns. Pull together all the feedback you have received in the workplace––from managers, peers, friends–– and look for patterns. Dig into the areas you feel most uncomfortable, especially if you heard similar feedback from different people. Start a journal or diary, and explore your life’s purpose.
Look for jobs that align with the organization’s and your personal goals.	Write down your personal and career goals, and review and refine the list every few days until you have something that feels powerful to you. Find and write down your organization’s goals. Test with others to see if you understand them properly. Then write down three goals of the organization that no one wrote down because they are deeply ingrained in the culture or perhaps not “safe” to say. Look for positions inside or outside your company that align with your goals. Ignore salary and title for the moment. Evaluate what attributes of those jobs have good alignment, and those that do not. Use this to refine your understanding of your true goals and needs. Create three radically different job descriptions (they do not even have to currently exist) that would align with your personal goals. See how you can increase their value to the organization.
Stay with organizations that have philosophies compatible with yours.	Capture your personal philosophy about life and work, perhaps with the help of a coach or trusted friend. Look for organizations anywhere in your company that might have some attributes that align with your philosophy. Find out more about them. Take time during the next month to ask questions that will help you more deeply understand the culture of organizations with which you come into contact. Do not be afraid to leave a situation in which you are deeply unhappy. This can be the best way to free up your time and attention to focus on what you really need.
Understand others’ points of view.	Find an area of the business with which you are confused or nervous. Investigate, and find out what others know that you don’t. Identify an interaction with somebody where you are confused or nervous. Investigate to uncover the other person’s point of view. Target a key relationship that you would like to build but is not yet established. Spend most of your interaction time listening and trying to understand. Delay giving your point of view.
Look at every activity as an opportunity to make a contribution and to learn something.	If you are bored or uninspired by your current job, focus on how you can build up the value that you might get if you focused on learning, building key relationships, or doing top-notch work. What could excite you? How can you create that excitement? The next time you are uninspired by a task assignment, explore what a truly excellent result might do for your boss, your organization, and yourself. How could the value of that work be dramatically increased? Identify three areas where you have the ability to change something significant. What would happen if you were able to achieve much better results with much less work? Pay attention to whether this motivates and excites you.
Limit the encroachment of work on your personal life.	Identify one thing you could do that would reduce the amount of time or effort you spend worrying about your job when you are not at work. Experiment with this for a month to see if it makes a difference. At the end of your work day, write down the list of things you do not want to forget tomorrow. Put this in a prominent place where you will be guaranteed to see it. Do this for a month to see if it helps you leave your work at the office. When you come up with a work-related idea or concern outside your work day, write it down and put it in a place where you will see it the next day. Leave yourself a voice-mail message at the office if that works for you. If you are working in a home office, establish regular office hours and stick to them. Do not attend to non-emergency work items outside your established hours. Do not check your e-mail or voice mail outside your hours. As an experiment, put a hard limit on the amount of time you spend working. Ruthlessly prioritize the work, and look for ways to get the most value from your limited time. Learn from this, and make permanent changes to the way you approach your job.
Keep your lifestyle within your current income.	Seriously analyze your financial situation, including all debts and assets. Enlist the help of a financial adviser to learn how financial planning works. Tightly monitor your expenses for a week. You will be surprised at where the money goes, and this will help you set better priorities. Consider what would happen if you cut back your monthly expenses by 10, 20, 40 percent. How would you change your spending if you expected to be out of work for more than a year? Use this technique to help establish what is fundamentally important to you, your life’s goals, and your family. There should be several levels of importance. Establish financial goals you and your family can agree with, and understand the limits that these things might put on your desired lifestyle. Identify areas where you might want to increase spending time rather than spending money.