Even dream jobs can be hard work

Do you count down the days to Friday? Get the fear on a Sunday night or does returning to work after holidays fill you with dread? It can be hard to know if it is normal to feel this way about work or if you are in the wrong job.

Last year, a survey by search engine Bing found that three out of five employees wanted to change job. Respondents cited “finances” and “not having the right skills” as holding them back from making the leap.

But with more than 40 years of your life on the line, isn’t it important to do the thing that you love?

In his job-hunting classic, What Colour Is Your Parachute?, career guru Richard Bolles describes the difference between the “traditional job hunt” and the “life-changing job hunt”. The former is about staying in the same line of work, matching your CV to a job ad and putting bread on the table. The latter requires a bit more, well, work.

Bolles says it is about looking for a new kind of work, wanting to put a sense of mission in your life and listening to your intuition about what feels right.

So if dawn flights and fat PowerPoint decks have lost their allure and the red flashing light on your BlackBerry fills you with dread, the voice of your intuition, like a little yapping dog that won’t shut up, may soon get so loud that you can’t ignore it.

We talk to five people who are doing what they love. While they admit their work is no picnic, for them, it might just be the dream job.