There are two types of stress, constructive and destructive. Constructive stress can be one of the more enjoyable things about your job. Constructive stress results from business competition, the pursuit of goals, and the desire to achieve. This kind of stress can momentarily increase blood pressure and kick in adrenaline. This stress winds up a salesman for a crackerjack presentation or gives an extra boost to a ball player who must hit in the tie-breaking run.
Destructive stress may be the reason you want to make a mid-career change. When a friend tells you he left his job because "the pressure" got to him, this is destructive stress. It results in depression, high blood pressure, ulcers, heart attack, and a vulnerable immune system. Too much destructive stress can kill you. It can also be murder on family relationships.
In most instances, the cause of destructive stress is a values conflict. Your personal values and those demanded from you by your career are not the same. You may be aware of the problem; or it may be so subtle that you only know you are unhappy and feel discontent at work, but don't know why. Values can provide career guidance when you understand them.
They are critical for two reasons:
- You never take any action without making a decision, and you never make a decision without consulting your values at your conscious or subconscious level.
- Destructive stress often results in career dissatisfaction. Its cause is a values conflict. You cannot resolve a conflict until you understand the nature of the conflict.
Understanding Personal Values
Frequently, people who divorce and remarry keep the same problems, they just change the person involved. Mid-career changers can fall into the same trap when their job or career conflicts with their deeper personal values. Changing jobs will not solve the problem until they resolve the values conflict. Values can be understood best by picturing yourself as a simple schematic. We have heard that every decision you make is based upon your values. You make decisions with your brain, but your brain uses data; and in the case of values, it gathers the data from three levels. In this illustration, the levels are represented by the skin, gut, and heart. The skin is the reactive level, which is influenced by circumstances and your daily environment. The gut is the gut level, where you store your conditioned responses and your learned social behaviors. The heart is the core level, where your innate and universal values are found.
Reactive
Like skin, reactive values respond to the immediate environment. If you are in a benevolent environment, it's a good day, and things are going well, your decisions/reactions will be positive. If the environment becomes malevolent or threatening, your reactions will be self-centered and self-protecting, regardless of the cost to others.
As a mid-career changer, you are concerned with the reactive level because you don't want to make shortsighted, self-centered decisions that you later will regret. The stress and pressure you are feeling at this point in your life make you vulnerable to the reactive level. You need to be able to look beyond the moment and keep in touch with your other values. A reactive values response would be to tell your boss to "take this job and shove it." That might feel good at the time, but within twenty-four hours you would regret the decision.
Gut
Values at this level are the result of childhood experiences with your parents, family, teachers, and friends. You learn values by watching what people do rather than listening to what they say. Your childhood associations are particularly influential between the ages of ten and twenty.
Gut values are very powerful values; they influence every major decision you make. They form your views about what is important to you and yours. They define what you accept as right and wrong. Your social standards and personal prejudices are held at this level.
Core
Core values are the principles and beliefs that you actually want to guide your life. Core values are we-centered rather than self-centered. They are ancient values that have stood the test of centuries. These values are the heart of all major religions, cultures, and philosophical systems found throughout the world. They are innate values that have promoted human survival. These are your deepest values. They can best be defined by listing nine universal core values:
- The world is an open opportunity; people choose to make life a heaven or a hell.
- People are basically good; they would rather help than hurt others.
- People make responsible choices; when given a chance, they learn and grow.
- The ends are justified only if the means are honorable.
- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
- All people deserve the right to choose their path, so long as others are not harmed. Likewise, they even deserve the right to fail and make mistakes.
- The true worth of people is in their contributions to the world, rather than their appearance, their race, their religion, or their socioeconomic status.
- As you sow, so shall you reap.
- Each of us owes something to this world; we want to leave the world a better place.
Deciphering the Conflict
Think how often you have heard someone say, "It's not what you know, it's who you know that counts around here." Or they say, "To survive around here you'd better do unto others before they do unto you." What is being described by such talk is a work environment-gut-level social standards- that conflict with your core principles and beliefs.
When you were young, you rationalized the behavior. After all, in high school the super athletes always got passing grades whether or not they studied. Your gut level accepted this behavior because of conditioning.
As you mature, what is important to you begins to change. It is less important to be accepted by everyone and more important to like yourself. In other words, your values emphasis begins to shift. Whether you realize it or not, you begin to want your behavior and your surroundings to be more consistent with your core values.
If you are feeling stress on the job, you probably have a conflict between the social standards required for success and the principles you believe should earn success.
If you try to resolve the conflict by simply changing jobs, and you don't take the time to decipher the cause of the conflict, you are almost guaranteed to take the problems with you. You'll change the setting, not the conflict, and you will still suffer from stress and depression, the primary symptoms of mid-career syndrome.
Matching Values to Your Career
Being in mid-career means you are undoubtedly a very busy person balancing career and family responsibilities. It has probably been a long time since you sat down in a quiet corner and took stock of your personal values. You need to take the time to do so.
Once you are familiar with your own values, you can analyze the type of stress you are under in your present position. Understanding your values can turn your current career crisis into a rewarding (and lasting) career change.
