The goal is to bring yourself to your work.

Jobs weren’t created for you. They were created for nameless, faceless, “here’s-what-we-would-like-if-we-could-engineer-someone-for-this-job” cogs.

In other words, when a search committee develops a job, they don’t develop it with you in mind.

You have to make it your own.

A number of years ago I took my dream job at Rice University as an associate director of leadership development. The culture was a fit, the manager was solid, and the work seemed interesting. It also seemed to align with my Profile of Self.

Then reality hit.

I was doing a lot more work outside of my strengths than with my strengths.

After those first six months, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. For the first time in years, I felt that same haunting feeling of incongruence.

Years earlier, I would have abandoned ship. But I applied what I knew about career and fit the job to me, not the other way around.

How did I do it?

I started by honing in on what I knew about when I thrived, based on my Profile of Self:

• I help individuals synthesize information that is important to their development.

In casual conversations with students I would help them get clear about their strengths and synthesize what they do well. As they benefited, they shared what I was doing with other students and, soon, I had a slow trickle of students visiting my office to seek clarity about their strengths. Instantly my energy went up.

Then I inserted another strength into what I did:

• I facilitate and teach something I care about for an audience that wants to listen and that benefits their life.

I contributed sessions to a two-day training for undergraduate leaders and they were a hit. Students loved them and my boss got to see me in my element. Shortly after, we had a conversation where she asked what we needed to re-arrange so that I could do more of that.

Throughout this process, I added this strength to my routine:

• I research information about a topic that is interesting to me and that I can use to benefit others.

I would bring articles to my check-ins, share them with my manager via email, and spend a portion of each day boosting my own knowledge which yielded massive energy.

Then, I layered on this strength:

• I can use my competitive edge and talents to take something that is good and make it better than it was before I got to it.

I did an analysis of current programs and began to make recommendations to my manager about things we could do to tweak and improve them. Because of the first three strengths, my credibility had gone up and she bought into the solutions I proposed.

I could keep going, but you get the point. During the first six months, I felt drained. Throughout the next six, I came alive. By the time I left Rice, the job was tailor-fit to me and my skill set and my energy and satisfaction was high.

Don’t be a slave to the job description you were hired for. Get clear about what you do best and do it!

The goal isn’t to do your job, it’s to bring yourself to your job. Your employer may have hired you to do a job, but they will keep you on board and reward you for bringing yourself to your work.

Oh, and your happiness and satisfaction will skyrocket, as well as your opportunities to do more of what you love.
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NOTE: If you aren’t doing the easy things exceptionally well, you won’t have the credibility to add additional value. No value-add can make up for dropping the ball on the small stuff.