AS if normal Sunday-night back-to-work blues weren’t bad enough, tomorrow morning we have to brace ourselves for “Blue Monday” – officially the most depressing working day of the year.

This is the day when, statistically, our commitment to our present job falls to an all-time low, and we decide, en masse, that career-wise, something “must be done”.

Blue Monday is no surprise to John Lees, recruitment manager turned career coach extraordinaire – the only mystery to him is why so few people actually do anything about it.

It’s no coincidence that January is the peak time for planning a career change or break, he said.

“It’s something to do with the year turning, and the dark evenings and dark mornings – people’s energy levels drop off, but the fact is a huge number of people whinge about it, but few actually do anything about it.”

After a lucrative but unrewarding career in recruitment, Lees reinvented himself as a career coach and writer who helps other people’s dreams come true. His own epiphany came during a casual conversation with a friend. “She just asked me what I was doing and at the time I was in a job that involved writing lots of reports. She just stared at me and said ‘that doesn’t sound like you at all’. It didn’t and it wasn’t.”

Today, as a full-time career coach and author of How To Get A Job You’ll Love, he spends his time helping people realise life is too short to spend it working at something they hate.

He has dozens of success stories, including one involving Peter Bates, who swapped the rat race for the good life.

Bates, 46, was once a merchant banker earning a six-figure salary. Fed up with the daily 10-hour grind of life in the bank, he was desperate to do something more practical. With Lees’s encouragement he stopped dealing in pork bellies and started raising them. He is now the proud, and very happy, owner of a rare-breed cow and pig farm in Devon.

“I had been working in the bank for a long time and spent a lot of my time helping other people realise the value of their businesses. But I wanted to do something for myself rather than simply help other people achieve what they wanted to do.”

Making the leap wasn’t easy, he said. “We couldn’t afford to buy a farm in Cheshire so it meant uprooting the family to Devon,” he said, which he admits was hard on his wife, Wendy, and his daughter, Emily, then 14.

However miserable people are in their job, he said, there was a comfort zone that was difficult to escape, especially if the career switch involved, as it did for the Bates family, a huge financial change.

The family income went from a salary in “the low hundreds of thousands”, to virtually zero as they set about restoring a dilapidated farm and raising their own rare breeds of cows and pigs. But three years on none of them regrets the move, and Bates has the joy and satisfaction of doing something he loves as well as seeing a business he built from scratch beginning to turn a profit.

Will Beale, a chemical engineer, spent 10 years working in detergents at Unilever in Port Sunlight in Wirral until one January he decided enough was enough and began looking for a job he could put his heart, as well as his brain into.

It wasn’t easy, but after almost a year’s planning and an eight-month career break, he landed the job of his dreams – project manager for WWF, which involves planning the priorities, practicalities and logistics of projects such as saving tigers in Nepal and India, safeguarding fish stocks in the UK and preventing the forests of Bor-neo being swamped in palm-tree oil.

“I never dreamt I would be able to make such a big jump so quickly,” said Beale, 37, who is married with three young children and survived eight months out of work while deciding what he wanted to do.

“You have to give yourself time to research and discover what it is you want to do, otherwise the temptation is to leap straight back into something very similar to what you have already been doing,” he said.

The other thing he believes holds people back is hanging on to the dream too long.

“It’s very important to move on from the hypothetical idea of what it might be like to do something and talk to the people who are actually doing it,” said Beale. He added that he had been reading about conservation work for years, but had never actually spoken to anyone who did it to find out what it was like.

That, explained Lees, was one of the reasons so few people who dreamt of changing their line of work or taking a career break, actually did it. Another was that they didn’t have the confidence to make the break, or thought their dreams were unrealistic.

“The first thing you have to do is make up your mind whether these feelings of dissatisfaction are strong enough,” he said.

“Think about how much of your time you spend doing unproductive, meaningless work that is not particularly helpful to other people.

“Is the work you do a poor match to the skills and gifts you have? Is more than half your time spent doing things that are dull, boring or pointless?

“If you get to that point you really need to do something about it.”

However much of a scaredy-cat or an ostrich you were, he said, inertia at that point was not an option.

“We don’t live life in a bubble, so if you’re feeling that your job is pointless, chances are that feeling is being communicated to your colleagues and your bosses and they could already be thinking that you are losing the plot. You could be on the redundancy list already,” he added.

That doesn’t mean you have to do an immediate Reggie Perrin and resign on the spot or swap the Volvo for a rotovator and a couple of piglets.

“We’re often too quick to see things as a clear choice – either we have a job we enjoy, or we have a job that pays the bills. It doesn’t have to be as drastic as that. It’s perfectly possible to adapt the job you already do.”

Never underestimate your value: good employees are in a strong position to negotiate changes from within, which could mean a career break or adapting your present job to something more enjoyable.

If you want a break without burning your bridges, you could negotiate a career break, he suggests.

Whether it’s learning to ski in the Alps, house-sitting in France or volunteering in South Africa, they are opportunities to learn valuable, transferable skills, recharge your batteries and add resourcefulness to your CV. As long as you return refreshed rather than restless, and focused rather than flaky, your career chances will be enhanced, not diminished.

“Whatever you do, don’t make it sound like a holiday, have a clear sense of what you’re doing and why. Don’t apologise for it – sell it.”

GETTING OUT

Fancy a drastic career change or a career break? Here’s how to do it:

- Stock up the lifeboat before you jump ship: catalogue your achievements and make sure that you have a good strong list before you go.

- Understand your skills and your value to an employer: that means matching what you are good at and what you enjoy doing to what an employer values and needs.

- Plan your change: if it’s a career break make sure that it involves learning transferable skills that you can bring back with you. If it’s a new career, stop dreaming and start talking – pick up the phone and ask the advice of someone who’s already living the dream.

- Don’t allow money worries to keep you trapped in a job you hate. Renegotiate your current job or start making concrete plans – while it remains a dream it remains out of reach.

- Realise your worth – and instead of complaining or apologising look for a solution and then sell it to your boss.

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