If you were to ask anyone whether they would like to have their dream job, or would prefer to do something they find dull, uninspiring, and unmotivating, which option do you think they would pick?

Today, there are more avenues available with every passing day to help us to find the jobs we would like to do, or to run our own successful businesses. Between things like a healthcare staffing company and easy to find training courses on a variety of different subjects, you’d think that finding your dream job might be easier today than ever before.

Unfortunately, though, many people – maybe most people – go about things entirely the wrong way when it comes to actually pursuing their dream jobs effectively.

Here are a few things you can do that will very likely stop you from actually managing to find your dream job.

Sitting Around and Thinking About It Endlessly

If you really want to make sure that you never find your dream job, maybe the best place to start is by sitting around and thinking about it endlessly, and ensuring that you constantly go back and forth in your own mind trying to rationally calculate the perfect job that will fulfil you.

The thing is, your dream job is always going to be something that you perceive through your intuition, heart, and gut – not through your thinking and reasoning mind, and trying to calculate what your dream job is in the abstract will never actually give you a proper sense of how you feel about a given job when push comes to shove.

Unfortunately, though, many of us are prone to habitual overthinking, and to the mistaken belief that if we just sit around and try to calculate the answer to a thing for long enough, we’ll finally come to the perfect conclusion, and to the true path of wisdom and insight.

Never Taking Any Chances

Never taking any chances in your professional life, and always playing it safe, can definitely help you to achieve your ambition of never finding your dream job.

For the most part, dream jobs are dream jobs because they stand out from the ordinary, and are meaningful, engaging and exciting in a way that other prospective jobs and career paths are not.

So, it stands to reason that you actually have to take some chances and put yourself out there in order to land yourself a job that you find deeply fulfilling in this manner.

Always trying to play it safe, to stick with what’s familiar and comfortable, and to avoid situations that come with a risk of failure, doesn’t allow a lot of room for exploring the kinds of avenues that are likely to lead to the job of your dreams – unless the job of your dreams happens to be found along a fairly predictable and reliable career path.

Always Trying to Be Strictly Rational and Ignoring Your Intuition

As mentioned in an earlier point, finding your dream job has a huge amount to do with your intuition and your deeper underlying sense of meaning. In this way, it’s a lot like a loving relationship with your significant other. What makes the relationship loving and rewarding is the fact that you love and care for each other, not the fact that you each tick off a bunch of rational checklist boxes for each other.

If you try to find your dream job purely through strict rational calculations – such as things like a particular income bracket, average amount of working hours per week, and so on – you are always going to be missing the point in some pretty fundamental ways.

Being attentive to the more intuitive side of yourself can help you to actually notice what sort of job inspires and motivates you, seems to beckon to you, and gets you excited and enthusiastic about getting out of bed in the morning.

When all is said and done, you’ll only know that you’ve found your dream job because of how it makes you feel, not because of how it makes you think. And so, there shouldn’t be anything at all controversial about the idea that it’s important to listen to your gut when seeking out your dream job.

Waiting for the Perfect Time to Get Started

So, let’s say that you have a pretty good idea about what your dream job might be – or at least, that you have a pretty good idea about the kind of direction you should move in order to experience a greater sense of meaning and purpose in your professional life.

Great, now the perfect way of sabotaging that is to make sure that you keep putting off the moment of action, and always delay and wait for the perfect time to get started, instead.

Life is always messy, for everyone. There are always hurdles to be overcome, duties to be attended to, and unexpected situations to be contended with. If you get into the habit of waiting for the perfect moment to get started pursuing your dreams, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that you are likely to never actually get started.

On the other hand, taking the first step to pursue your dream job, today, can have the magical effect of revealing the next steps ahead, while simultaneously making room for serendipity.

Follow Someone Else’s Dream

If you don’t know what your dream job would be, then becoming invested in someone else’s dream and pursuing that instead is certainly likely to be an effective way of making sure that you never do actually manage to find your own dream.

Today, all you need to do is to scroll through your social media feeds to see people advertising all sorts of different careers and lifestyles that are seen as “successful” and “desirable”.

Before you set off on a path of pursuing a job and lifestyle that you don’t actually find meaningful, however, take time to question whether or not you are just following the path of least resistance by pursuing someone else’s vision of success.