The power of understanding the detail of what you love
As I write we are just over halfway through the current Life Navigation Lab coaching program, Navigating Life Transitions. More specifically, we are navigating career transitions, but the reality is, the experience of our jobs impacts the rest of life, and vice versa. Throughout the program, in a small group of no more than six people, we use a range of techniques, tools and coaching conversations to help people explore their current state and make decisions about their next steps. Questions people have been asking so far as they come into the program include:
- “Should I follow through on my long-term plan to relocate and work overseas? I’m loving my current work, but will I regret it if I don’t follow my dream?”
- “How do I follow up a long-term corporate career with something that gives me a sense of purpose? Or should I go back to what I know and focus on putting away more money for retirement years?”
- “Everyone says I should be retiring – but I don’t think I want to! How will I know when the time is right?”
- “I’m really good at what I do – but I don’t think it gives me joy anymore. How do I work out what else I can do, and what I can afford to do, or do I stick with what I’m good at?”
One of the things that participants find hugely valuable about the program is the peer-to-peer encouragement and support offered by others who are also asking questions about career and purpose. For me as coach and convenor, I feel every cohort offers me fresh insights and signpost me to new ideas and resources. So it was no surprise when this week, a gem popped up in the conversation, shared by one of the current participants.
This gem was the concept of ‘unpacking a job’. I’ve used a number of similar tools in the past, including ‘Pleasure and Purpose Mapping’ (see a short video intro to this concept here, with apologies for my very poor video presence – some new tools and more practise and I’m getting better, I promise!) or ‘Micromotives’, both of which I share and coach on in Life Navigation Lab on a regular basis. But I always love a fresh reframing of a familiar concept, and unpacking a job is exactly that!
So, with credit to Adam Mastroianni, here is a brief overview of the method.
What Is “Unpacking a Job”?
Unpacking is the process of breaking down a job into its real, everyday tasks—beyond the romanticised or abstract idea of what the job seems like, or what you picture it to be. It’s about asking detailed, sometimes uncomfortable questions, to reveal what the work actually involves.
The coffee beans procedure
Mastroianni uses the example of setting up a café to show how the method works. The dream to run a café is common for many people as they grow up – my 15 year-old currently has it in his sights – but often the dream is shaped by the experience of being a customer at a café and how much joy that gives you, rather than the experience of actually running it. So the wrong questions to ask are how much you like cafés and how much you want to have a great café near you Better questions focus you on what is involved in running a café day to day, such as:
- Where would you get the coffee beans?
- Will you bake muffins or outsource them?
- What software will you use for scheduling?
- How will you handle staff emergencies?
- What will you look for in a staff member and how will you train them?
- How will customers know you exist?
- What sort of décor will you have?
- Who will clean the café each night?
- Who will run it when you want a day off?
These sorts of questions help reveal whether you are genuinely interested in the work of running a café, or just the idea of it.
Why unpacking matters and the reality of jobs
In order to picture complex realities, as humans we create codes and schema to simplify and ‘flatten’ things out – much as a map creates a schematic version of the complexity of a landscape or a country. So our view of the future is a bit like a map – with the lumps and bumps flattened out into a broad sense of what the future will be like. Unpacking helps us reinsert the lumps and bumps and make it 3D rather than 2D.
So instead of thinking about a general sense of what a job might be, unpacking is one tool (amongst many) to help you get under the surface and actually consider the day-to-day reality of that job. Without unpacking, people often chase careers based on stereotypes and assumptions, not everyday realities. I’m reminded of an example from Paul Dolan’s book, Happiness by Design (from which the ‘Pleasure and Purpose’ activity mentioned before is derived) in which he relates meeting a friend who is in her ‘dream job’ that she has aspired to for her whole career. As they chat, all he hears is negativity and complaints about the role and the organisation, yet when challenged, she still holds to the belief that it is her dream job. This sounds like a perfect opportunity to ‘unpack’ the role and work out if the day-to-day reality matches the long-held assumptions about what the work would be.
How to Unpack your current job
Ask specific questions:
- What do you do today at work?
- What tools do you use?
- Do you enjoy the actual tasks, not just the outcomes?
- How would you describe the environment you work in?
- Do you have people you can trust at work? Who has got your back?
- How do you feel each morning when it’s time to go to work?
- How do you feel each evening when it’s time to leave?
These sorts of questions help you to ‘unpack’ the realities not only of the role you do but also the details of your current work. You might discover that while you love the actual work you do, you really don’t enjoy other aspects round it – the commute, the organisational culture or the long hours. What’s more, you may discover things you didn’t realise before, perhaps some tiny detail of what you do that gives you a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction that can give new purpose or direction to your career quest.
Would you like help applying this unpacking method or discovering more methods and tools to help you work out your next steps? Jump over to our coaching and mentoring page or get in touch to find out more about 1:1 and group coaching options. You can find the dates and sign up for the next Navigating Life Transitions Program here.