What Percent Happy Are You at Work? | Rachel Spekman

What percent happy are you at work? That is the first question my guest asks every new client, and I want you to sit with it before you read another word of this post. Not the answer you would give at happy hour. The real number.

So many of us are sitting in jobs that look excellent on paper. Good salary. Good title. Good benefits. And quietly, underneath all of that, we are miserable. And then we feel guilty for even naming it, because somebody else would take our job in a heartbeat, right?

My guest, Rachel Spekman, is a therapist and career coach, and the founder of Made For More Coaching. She works with high performing professionals who are asking themselves some version of that same question, and she has built real exercises around getting an honest answer, and then doing something with it.

The Number Most of Us Are Afraid to Say Out Loud

Rachel asks every client the same opening question. What percent happy are you in your role right now. Most people who find her are somewhere between 20 and 40 percent. Some are much lower.

Most people find me when they're 20 to 40% happy at work. I actually had somebody yesterday who said they're 3% happy at work.

Rachel Spekman

Three percent. Sit with that number for a second. And here is the part that stopped me. That person did not start at 3 percent. Rachel described watching it happen in slow motion with another client: 50 percent happy, then 40, then 30. Nobody wakes up one day at rock bottom. It erodes.

Stuck is not a character flaw. It is data.

The Hidden Cost of Staying

We talked about the golden handcuffs, the salary, the vacation days, the title that keeps a lot of women parked in jobs they have quietly outgrown. On paper, leaving looks irrational. But Rachel, who trained her first year as a therapist in a busy community health center, has seen where the real cost shows up when we stay too long anyway.

Your body does keep the score. Your body's telling you something's wrong, something's not right, something's a little misaligned. When we start to ignore it, that's when we see a cost.

Rachel Spekman

She was seeing patients referred with racing hearts and skin rashes long before anyone connected it back to their jobs. And on the mental health side, she talks about what happens when your whole day becomes a countdown clock. It erodes your confidence and your enjoyment, long before it ever shows up on a performance review.

If you are feeling that erosion right now, you are not imagining it, and you are not alone in it.

Small, Medium, or Large: Finding Your Pivot

Here is where Rachel's work gets genuinely practical. Not every misalignment calls for the same size move, and she gave me a clear way to tell the difference.

None of these is more valid than the others. The point is not to force a large pivot when what you actually need is small. The point is to get honest about which one you are really in.

Two Exercises to Get You Unstuck

Rachel gives every new client the same starting exercises, and she offered them to our listeners directly.

Permission Is the First Move

Near the end of our conversation, Rachel named the piece underneath all of this, and it is not a strategy. It is permission.

One of the key pieces we can do is give ourselves permission, because very often it's, I shouldn't feel this way, or I'm lucky to have this job. Some of these are realities, for sure, but we're dismissing our own actual feelings.

Rachel Spekman

She named her own version of this too, the moment that eventually became the name of her company.

I was telling a client, you're made for more than this job. And she turned to me and said, that's the name of your company. I'm getting the chills telling you this right now.

Rachel Spekman

That is where Made For More Coaching came from. Not a branding exercise. A client, saying a true thing back to her.

What I Want You to Take From This

Rachel closed with something I want every one of you to hear directly.

Take yourself seriously. Take what you're doing seriously. If you're listening, you are high performing. You're going to work, you're doing the things, you're getting the projects done.

Rachel Spekman

One more thing, because it is the part I care about most. Doing the job audit and naming your real number gets you clear with yourself. Being recognized for what you bring is a second skill, and it is the one I teach. That is the Articulation Gap, the distance between the impact you create and the impact leadership recognizes and rewards. Rachel's exercises get you the data. What you do with that data, and how you put it in front of the people who decide your next role, is where we pick up.

So here is your move this week. Answer Rachel's question honestly. What percent happy are you at work. Then do the job audit. Just get the data.

About Rachel Spekman

Rachel Spekman is a therapist and career coach, in that order, and the founder of Made For More Coaching. She began her career as a teacher, moved into nonprofit work with children, and then into operations and project management in the startup and corporate world before an unexpected family planning journey led her to social work school.

Today Rachel focuses on identity transformation work, guiding high performing professionals through expected and unexpected career transitions. She describes her practice as both therapy and strategy: getting clients honest about where they are misaligned, and building a real plan for what comes next.

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