Your Cheatin' Heart

You're not actually cheating...yet, but you've lost that loving feeling at work. Your body is at work but your soul and mind are off riding horses with a guy who looks remarkably like Brad Pitt. In this case, the guy who looks remarkably like Brad Pitt is "that job over there that looks so much cooler/better/easier than mine." You're having an emotional affair with the job down the hall. Oh sure, you haven't slept with it yet, but it looks awfully cute and you're spending all your free time lusting after it and text messaging about it and planning what you'd do if you got it. You're ignoring your current job which suddenly looks full of flaws and incredibly demanding to boot. The way the photocopier jams up on you on Fridays used to be cute but now it's just plain irritating. Job down the hall's photocopier never jams.

While you're not guilty of outright cheating, you are having an emotional affair. Your heart has turned a corner away from your current job, leaving it swinging in the wind, wondering what it did wrong. The question is, are you having an incredibly cow-like "the grass is always greener" episode, which could be cured by a good old-fashioned Career One-night Stand or is this something more serious?

Try the Career One-night Stand as a level-one cure. In career terminology, the One-night Stand is known as "job shadowing". I know -- it sounds kind of dull or even a bit creepy, which is why I gave it a more exciting label. The Career One-night Stand is every bit as fun and interesting as the romantic one-night stand, except without most of the risks to your safety and schoolgirl reputation.

The idea is to try on different types of work without having to commit to them. You could interview or even follow around for part of a day, say, a tax lawyer (hey, that's some people's idea of a dream job--don't make fun!) or maybe an architect or a fashion magazine editor. See if the work is really as great as you dreamed. You might find that looking from over there back down the hall at your job, you suddenly remember why it seemed so cute when you took it on all those eons ago. Or, you might find the new career love of your life.