You have the right to safety. You have the right to personhood. You deserve to feel safe and protected at work, on the streets, in your home. It’s taken me a while to marshal my thoughts around the needless death of George Floyd, coming as it did right with the harassment of Christian Cooper and…
What if you’re still not clear about what you are meant to do? You may be someone who doesn’t need to love your job. In fact, your job might just be something that gives you the room to do the stuff you love—a means to an end, rather than the end in and of itself.…
Liking your coworkers is so important to liking your job. In my last job, I really struggled because there were a lot of challenging people there. Briefly, there was a fellow who called himself “Mr. Diversity” and complimented a Vietnamese American student on “good Asian work ethic.” There was the person who cleared his throat…
Finding what you love can be a double-edged sword. How can you be sure that doing it for pay won’t kill off your passion and enthusiasm? I enjoy food a lot, and for a while I’d thought that maybe I wanted to be a restaurant critic. I mean, get paid to eat? That sounded…
But how can you determine what you really enjoy? It seems like this should be simple, but often it’s just not. We get so bogged down with other people’s advice, opinions about prestige, messages about what’s realistic, worries about money, etc., that sometimes we just can’t tell. And sometimes we haven’t really had the space…
What are you doing with your holiday? If you get one, that is, and if it’s different from your current state of employment. I ask because often what we do in our leisure time can give us a sense of what we really enjoy doing. Things are different these days, of course, so maybe…
How can you say no when your boss wants you to do something more? I’ve been talking about saying no this week, and I know this particular issue is a big challenge for a lot of us. It’s certainly something I’ve struggled with in previous jobs. In terms of approaching this issue,…
The first real job offer I turned down was terrifying. I was fresh back from Japan, and had realized through my time there that I didn’t want to teach—the thing I’ d clung to as a possible career all through college and my 3 years on the Japan Exchange & Teaching Program. So in…
Can you turn down a job offer in this job market? Absolutely! I know things are tough out there, but that’s no reason for you to have to settle for something you’ll hate. Okay, maybe you take a short-term job that doesn’t ring all your bells—that’s my definition of a “gap” job. But…
I’ve learned through these past weeks of working from home that I need clear boundaries between work and not-work. For the first few weeks, I let things bleed together, keeping my computer on my lap on the couch, checking emails over lunch. That works for some people, but I am not one of them! I…