ABLE Account – Flourish

5 Tactics to Discover a Dream Job

The Peer Support Guideline tells us: We expect a better tomorrow in a realistic way.

Finding our dream job is predicated on having realistic goals for what a better job is for us.

First take into account what you realistically can and can’t do.

A person with a criminal history might have to attach a 4-Point Response to a job application that states why and how they’ve changed and become a productive law-abiding citizen since coming out of jail. (A lot of employers are still hesitant to hire people who served jail time regardless of the type of offense.)

Try on a career or two or three by doing an internship or volunteer work in the field(s).

Chris Guillebeau, the author of Born for This, call this “career shopping” instead of career hopping. Any number of free or paid personality and vocational tests can help you narrow down your search to two or three alternatives.

It’s like being at a designer sample sale–you won’t know if a career like an item of clothing will fit until you try it on. Risk-taking involves making a mistake to learn what not to do.

Get trained to code HTML, cut hair, or in another skill that is valuable.

This can help you work at a job to get experience while you look for a more ideal job. In the 1990s I typed 75 WPM and knew MS Word back when it was 3.0 with a File Manager document system. Thus I was always able to get temporary jobs when I was unemployed.

Staying current with in-demand skills required in your field can also make you competitive in obtaining an actual dream job.

Use your gifts, strengths, personality traits, and life experience as the foundation for building a successful career on.

The job you covet that appears and sounds so dazzling might actually be a nightmare not a dream job if it’s ill-fitting. To this day it eludes me how I could’ve thought I would succeed as a corporate superstar when I was and always will be a quirky artist at heart.

Pay attention to your gut instinct or practical intuition that is telling you what to do and what might be a good fit.

Truly the insight to a dream job might come to you in a dream or a flash like a light bulb going off.

Accommodations on the Job

For those of us with a severe form of an illness we might need reasonable accommodations on the job to be able to do the job alongside others who don’t have functional limitations.

First talk with your pdoc about how to manage side effects of medication. As soon as I started taking the higher dose at night and tiny dose in the morning I was wide awake every single day without exception.

Before that I had to concoct an excuse for falling asleep during the day. The excuse was bought and an accommodation was given until a former friend suggested I ask my pdoc about changing the dose time to night.

Voila! I quickly no longer had side effects and was awake every day.

My point is: finding work in a quirky, creative environment might be a better option.

I famously joke that in the 1990s I made a career out of being professionally unemployed. I was laid off from four of the five jobs I had in only seven years.

While I was unemployed I took temporary work assignments because I was female and could type 75 WPM–a coveted speed. I had fast fingers on the keyboard so kept getting temp jobs in offices doing word processing.

I was a whiz at MS Word and Excel ever since 1995 when the DOS operating system was still around. Do you remember DOS?

Creating solo gigs for yourself in addition to a cheerful day job might be the way to go too. If doing what you love won’t net a lot of money to have extra things in addition to paying rent and utilities and your credit card in full every month–find a second job you can do on nights and weekends.

Going into debt isn’t necessary. Living within our means and even below our means is the way to go. Have on hand an emergency with as much money as you can fund it with to tide you over in a time of job loss, long-term illness, or other unforeseen expense.

Create an ABLE Account as your very first emergency fund.

I’m going in the next blog entry to talk about accommodations some more.

Setting Up an ABLE Account

I read on the Internet that most people think favorably of union employees. I remember the song that urged clothes buyers in the 1970s to “look for the union label” with pride.

Trust me: members of unions aren’t getting rich. Most of us aren’t lazy *sses or rude to patrons. I write about this because if you’re considering finding a job often you will have to choose it for love or money. Not all careers pay well. Yet you can be happy earning less and doing good.

That’s why I’ve decided to talk about how it’s not what you have in terms of the things you can buy that counts–it’s whether you’re happy and doing things that give you joy and satisfaction.

I’ve taken a hard-line stance against traditional day programs here and elsewhere. I’ve made the case for doing volunteer work. I advocate using the services of an IPRT. I recommend cognitive remediation and social skills training as the first “treatment” for individuals with schizophrenia who haven’t held a job before and want to work at a job.

Thus in the coming blog entries I’ll talk about things I wrote in my book Flourish: How to Thrive Living with a Mental Illness.

I’ll end here for now with my contention that the U.S. government isn’t doing anything for ordinary Americans who struggle to survive on their salaries “paycheck-to-paycheck” as the living goes. I’ll stop now with this thought: the term “working poor” is not an oxymoron; it’s a true account of the lives of a lot of people living in America.

That said I think it’s always preferable to hold some kind of job, either full-time, or part-time in addition to collecting SSI or SSDI.

In this regard the government isn’t entirely heartless:

President Obama (way to go!) signed into law the ABLE Act (Achieving A Better Life Experience.)

Those of us who were eligible for SSI before the cut-off age of 26 can have set up a tax-free savings account, up to $100K, that can be funded with $14K/per year. The money can be used for healthcare, living expenses, job training, and education, among other things.

No kidding. This is now possible.

See the AutismSpeaks website for detailed information on setting up an ABLE account.

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