6 Simple Steps to STOP Feeling Trapped in Your Job

Do you currently feel trapped in your nine to five, in a job you hate, in the quote-unquote rat race, but you can't afford to quit or leave your job? In today's podcast, I'm gonna walk you through a six-step process that will completely change the way you are looking at your job to create a life you love, and the catch is you don't even have to leave your job. Yes, you heard that correctly. You can change the way you are thinking and feeling about this job that you are dreading, this job that you're hating, being stuck in the rat race without even having to leave your job. If you don't make any changes with your mindset, with the way you're looking at it, you're gonna be stuck in this loop of dissatisfaction, of feeling unhappy with your life and where you're at. That will spill over into your health and your relationships too. I know this because I experienced it myself firsthand. I was working as a corporate lawyer, and honestly, I just felt like a cog in the wheel. I felt like my potential was not being maximized, and I just felt like I was undervalued. That was until I considered the exact six-step process that I'm gonna share with you in today's video, and I went from hating my job as a corporate lawyer, thinking I was gonna leave, to completely changing the way I viewed myself in that role, and therefore, how I viewed the rest of my life, and how I just found so much more enjoyment out of everything else, and including my job, without ever leaving it. For those of you wondering today, I'm still a corporate lawyer. It looks a little bit different. I'm not working at a firm. I'm doing it on a consulting basis, but I found a way to completely reframe the way I was looking at my job before I even made that transition to consulting, and I'm gonna share it exactly with you today because I know that being in that place is such a crappy feeling. It's such a soul-chipping experience, but it's not one you need to be stuck in. By the end of this video, you're gonna also feel released from these feelings, from this stuckness, and have a completely new way of looking at your life, and your worth. I'm also gonna share at the end a bonus tip I only worked out years after being stuck here, years after working this all out, so make sure you stay tuned for that at the very end. Before this episode starts, I've got a favor to ask of you. 85% of people who regularly watch this podcast are yet to subscribe to this channel, and 15% of those who have are yet to hit the bell notification. The bigger this platform gets, the more people we can impact and connect with, and the bigger the guests are gonna get. So if I can ask you for one favor, if you've so far enjoyed this podcast, this channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button and turn your notifications on. I'm your host, Erica, and let's dive into today's episode. Now, the reason I wanted to make this video is because I think there's a lot of very, let's just say, fluffy advice out there. Do what you love, find your passion. That's not realistic for a lot of us. We have financial responsibilities. There are jobs that we have that just need to pay the bills. So I don't think this is always the best advice because it's really just not practical for most of us. Responsibilities mean we have financial means, and I want you to know that it's okay to have a job that just satisfies a financial need of yours, but you don't need to feel trapped because of that, right? That doesn't need to be a soul-chipping experience. There are other things we can do to buffer out our fulfillment and our joy. So let's go through the six-step process. The first thing is kind of an acceptance step. We need to realize and accept that we are not our jobs. Your job does not define you. And this one is one I actually had to unlearn because I grew up, like many of you watching, you go to school, you go to uni, you study for something, and then you become that thing. In my case, it was a lawyer. I went to law school, graduated, and went straight into the workforce. And because we spend so much of our time at work, it's very difficult to define ourselves or identify ourselves outside of what we do because that is the majority of where we spend our time. But the first step in this, in breaking free of this trapped feeling, is really accepting that you are not your job. Some things that really helped me break out of this was doing value-based exercises. So there are heaps of links online where you can work out what your values are. And that in and of itself shows you things like friendship, community, loyalty. You know, there are so many different types of values that when you actually take these tests and they tell you what they are, you'll see that the top five, the top six, whatever you wanna look at, they don't describe your job, they describe you. So you need to start thinking and separating yourself from your job and your identity because they're two separate things. Your job is what you do, it's not who you are. That's step one. Step two is kind of like an evolved, an evolutionary acceptance from step one. And that is acknowledging you're actually not supposed to do just one thing. As humans, we're multifaceted beings. We have so many varied interests. And I always talk about how it is impossible in my eyes to have a job or a career or even a business that fulfills every single one of your interests. I think that's impossible. And I don't think it needs to be that way either. But if you're anything like me, you kind of have this expectation that your job will be the thing that satisfies you 100%. That for me, that yearning, what I was searching, what I was looking for in a law career, I was looking for it to satisfy me 100%. And what that meant was every year I would change jobs. I'd be like, oh, the firm's too big. I might try something smaller. Oh, I'm sick of working in private practice. I'm gonna move in-house and so on and so forth. I kept job hopping until I realized that my job's not meant to be the only thing that satisfies me. And putting all that pressure on it to be the one thing is what leaves us feeling really unsatisfied because it's never gonna be the thing that ticks every single box for us. So this is another acceptance piece. And once you're okay with that, it really does take that pressure off. And maybe you're also feeling that pressure from society, right? I always talk about this as well. When you meet someone, it's like, oh, hey, what do you do? But we never ask people who they are. I met these random people out one night and this guy introduced me to his friend and he said, this is, let's just say John. This is John. He loves surfing in Sri Lanka. He has two dogs and he's in Dubai every six months. He actually introduced him by who he was. I don't even know what he did for work still to this day. So I just think it's a really nice way to look at our lives and say, okay, step one, our job doesn't define us. And step two, we're not meant to just do the one thing. We can actually breathe and accept that we can do other things. Other things can form a part of our life too. So once we kind of accept one and two, we can move on to three, which is looking at what are the gaps I'm currently experiencing in my current job? Because there's no point saying, yep, you can do all these other things. You can find all these other things. If you don't actually know what you're missing in your current role and therefore what you might need to buffer or add on to give yourself a fuller experience, right? So this is exactly what I did before I started this podcast. I sat down and I was like, okay, what is it? I keep moving jobs. It's obviously not the firm anymore. It's not the team. It's not the partner I'm working for. It's actually the job, right? It's not fulfilling me a hundred percent. What am I looking for, right? What are the gaps? For me, it was deep and meaningful conversations. It was introspection. It was challenging my mindset and growing from a self-development point of view. Those were books I were reading at the time, which they somewhat filled the gap, but not entirely. It was the conversation piece that I was really missing. It was the connection with community. And so one thing led to another and I started the podcast and it created this beautiful harmony because it filled a gap that I was never gonna get in law, but allowed me to have an outlet for it. So for you watching, you need to think about what are the gaps in my current role? Appreciate that you can't force that into your existing role. I think even if you have your own business, you can't make everything into one role, right? And I don't think we should want that either because life is about having a fuller experience. So this step's really about working out what are the gaps. And then step four is working out what are the buffer for those gaps? So in my case, it was the podcast. It held that space for the skills and the interests I had that was not present in my job as a corporate lawyer. So for you, what could possibly be those buffers to fill in those gaps, to give you that balance with what you're missing in your job, to take that pressure off your job, to be the one thing that satisfies you? And then the fifth step is give yourself time. So it's very hard to know before you start something to say, yep, this is gonna be the thing that fills that gap, that is gonna be my buffer, and that's gonna give me full experience. Sometimes we need to do things for a little while to see if it's actually the right fit for us. Take as an example, I did ceramics, right? And I loved it. It was something creative. I don't do anything with my hands or anything artistic. I did that for a few months and I absolutely loved it. But now I can't just go back to it every weekend. I don't know, it's kind of like I've moved on and it was like good for a period of time. It gave me that creative peace. Whereas now I'm doing a little bit more with a podcast. So my creativity is being sparked there. So don't be too rigid with these things and give them a bit of time, right? You have to experiment and see like, is it an activity? Is it just a habit? Like you have to give it time to see if it's gonna be the right fit for you. And just like I talk about with our non-negotiables and our balance, like these are changing things. So in 10 years time, they're gonna look really different. In five years time, even in 12 months time, because you're growing and changing so much. Like what you need and what you're interested in can also evolve. But the key here is just thinking about what are the skills or the values that are missing? What are the buffers? And then give them time to play out and just see how they go. And the sixth step is just do more of what fills you up. Stop focusing on the negativity that comes from a job you hate, how it makes you feel, how it makes you feel trapped. I think back to those days and how my soul felt like it was being chipped away. And I was just so focused and frustrated on that. Not spending any of my extra time doing what I loved, thinking about what are the gaps? What are the buffers? What can I try? So once you find something you really enjoy, just do more of it or think of other ways you can lean into the same energy, whether it's being creative, whether it's cooking and sharing with other people, whether it's building community, whether it's being outside. Find your thing and then just do more of that. So as promised, I'm gonna share a little bonus tip, which is something I only really worked out after years of being in this soul chipping experience. And that is the job you hate will teach you way more than the job you love. The analogy I like to give is like a workout, right? Like if you're going to do a really tough, grueling workout, that's where you're gonna build muscle. That's where you're gonna push your limits. That's where you're really gonna challenge yourself versus if you went and just did a cruisy workout, feels nice, feels easy. You're not really pushing yourself. You're just in a comfort bubble. So the job you hate is a lot like a really tough workout. It's gonna be uncomfortable. You're really gonna be pushing yourself. You're gonna be feeling emotions and things that you don't love, but you're gonna be learning and growing so much as a person. And the bottom line is it's like anything, right? A relationship that didn't work out, a move in life that didn't work out or a job that you don't like. These things become points of reference for us to reflect on so that when the job we do love comes around, the relationship that is right for us comes around or the move in life that feels right for us. We know that because we have a point of reference for what we don't like, for what is not a good fit for us. So the job you hate, the job that you're currently stuck in that you don't love is actually teaching you a lot more than the job that you potentially love. Now, if this episode has spoken to your soul, I did an incredible interview with a woman who I find so inspiring. Her name is Tracy Halmus and we had an incredible conversation. She actually had quite a similar trajectory to me moving out of the corporate world into finding something else and creating those buffers in her life. We had a very, very similar conversation, but she actually speaks about how you shouldn't be looking for your passion, right? She just says you do not need to look for your passion and that's a very fluffy way to go about finding your side thing or your next thing. So she gives us some really practical tips in that episode on actually how to build out your next steps and just more advice, right? For anyone stuck in a job that they don't love. So I highly recommend checking that out. I'll put a link to that one in the show notes. And I know that if this conversation has resonated with you, then that one is gonna be a home run as well. I'll see you guys in next week's podcast. Until then, stay balanced.