A friend once said, “If I knew that job satisfaction was so elusive, I wouldn’t have spent half my life looking for it.” I asked him to define what job satisfaction for him would be and he responded “I’ll know when I find it.”

Job satisfaction for some stems from the challenges in the job or a sense of purpose while for others it's more extrinsic and may be measured by the money they make. For others it may come from the learning that takes place or from knowing that their work matters. For some, simply having a job to go to everyday in order to have "other" things in life is fine, and it's from accepting that they can derive their satisfaction.

Defining Factors For Your Job Satisfaction: Defining the factors for your own job satisfaction requires you jumping all the way back to the beginning and walking through your career life; but instead of identifying duties, responsibilities, job descriptions etcetera as you might in order to create an outline for your resume or vitae, look at your successes and there underpinnings, such as:

• Instinctive skills – the automatic, the intuitive, creative skills perhaps that you drew upon at that time or another
• Learned skills – web development, estate planning, tax accounting to name a few

Also, do not limit yourself to jobs. You have other successes form experiences that too are relevant and transferable.

• Consider your successes outside the workplace - When you take this walk-through, consider too alumni associations, community and civic organizations, councils with which you may have been involved and teams on which you played or Boards on which you served through the course of your life.

Once you have all these successes out on the table, you can identify the actual skills, personal and professional characteristics and knowledge areas, inherent or learned, that you drew upon to succeed theses are the "underpinnings" to your successes as it were, or your “success attributes”. Don't stop there.

Divide those success attributes into two groups:

• Motivated successes - Those you are interested in perpetuating in your career
• Unmotivated success - Those in which you have little or no interest

Very simply, the success attributes of interest are those you not only do well but enjoy doing – they are motivating for you. The others may also be things you do well, maybe very well, but are not interested in doing – they are unmotivating. Say for example you're terrific at editing research reports but don't enjoy it. If you're caught on the job being good at it and consequently it becomes 20% of your job, well...there goes 20% of your job satisfaction, right out the window.

Caution: If You Don’t Think You’ll Enjoy It Don’t Get Caught Doing It. Too many people get caught doing something well that they don't enjoy, it becomes part of their job, as a result, and depending on how much a part, will determine their level of angst - the most severe being that which requires them to pull themselves out of bed every morning and drag themselves to work. How many people do you know like that? They live for Fridays and vacations. Hey...Life's too short!

Once you have defined and thus classified your success attributes you have laid the groundwork and are well on your way to defining the "best fit" positions for your next career step.

When you know what it is you can do, and moreover, want to do and will enjoy doing most, you are in the best position to capitalize on the opportunities that await you; and why?...We are at our best when doing that which we enjoy doing most.