More Than a Paycheck: Learning to Love the Job You’re In
By Jackie Kelm
It’s Monday morning. Some of us lucky souls greet the workday with excitement and anticipation, while others seek their only joy at the coffee station. Regardless of your current level of job satisfaction, Jackie Kelm, author of the book Appreciative Living, has four tips on how you can make your work life more enjoyable.
1. Dust off your dreams. The best place to start is at the beginning. Think back to what first excited you about your current job. What were your hopes and dreams in the beginning? Try to put yourself in the moment and relive the good feelings. As you consider all the different things that first excited you, what do you find that remains today? For example, you might have been eager finally to be working in your field of interest. Perhaps you were excited to be working for a prestigious company. Find something in your original aspirations that is still true. Connecting to our dreams and positive feelings helps re-ignite them, and motivates us in subconscious ways to re-experience them. It causes us to refocus on the positive aspects of our situation, and renew our energy to achieve more in our lives.
2. Get in touch with your strengths. Do you prefer to plan or be spontaneous? Do you like to analyze things or are you more of an action person? Do you know what you are good at? How does you current job line up with your strengths? Positive Psychology research by Dr. Martin Seligman shows that we perform better—and enjoy ourselves more—when we use our strengths.. Dr. Seligman has created a free on-line survey at www.AuthenticHappiness.com that will give you a detailed strength profile. He suggests we look for ways to incorporate our strengths on the job to be happier and more effective. For example, if you love to learn new things, try working on projects or activities that require a lot of investigation or research. If you like to socialize, make sure you have ample opportunities to talk with people regularly in your daily activities. This might seem obvious, but you would be amazed at how many of us are working in jobs that don’t match our strengths.
3. Find something good. Looking for the good in the current situation, no matter how small, can begin to create positive feelings. Professor Barbara Fredrickson from the University of Michigan has conducted research showing that positive emotions cause us to think more clearly and develop more creative solutions to our problems. One simple way to begin feeling better is to create a gratitude list. The task is simple, but the benefits are immeasurable. Just list 3-5 different things each morning or evening that you are grateful for in your current position. Depending on your current level of unhappiness, finding items to list may be difficult at first. You may find yourself writing things like, “The restrooms always have running water.” That’s OK. Just keep making the lists and your attention will begin to shift. If you continue to struggle, try to enhance your gratitude by changing your perspective. Look at your current situation through the eyes of someone else: a person who is desperately looking for a job, someone from a developing nation, or a person who cannot work due to illness or disability. As you do this exercise you will notice it gets easier to find the good things over time. There is also a wonderful side benefit to this practice: the more you focus on what you like, the more it begins to show up in your experience.
4. Make a Small Change. If a genie suddenly appeared and could magically change one thing about your current job, what would you wish for? Would it be a nicer boss? More interesting work? Higher pay? Now, as you think about this change, what small thing could you do that would begin to move you in the direction of this change? The key word here is small. The truth is, big changes are simply a lot of small changes that add up to something big. If it’s a nicer boss you desire, what could you do to make your time with the current boss a tiny bit more enjoyable? Could you write a gratitude list about her to begin to shift your thinking? Could you notice the times she seems to be in a good mood and try to meet with her during those times as much as possible? If you want more interesting work, could you add some small task to an existing responsibility that would be interesting for you? Could you take a class? What about scanning the internet to see what other jobs are out there? Whatever it is that will make a small difference, do it for a while. And then make another small change.
And now I’ll let you in on a little secret. These four practices can be applied to any area of life where you want more joy. I suggest you try them and see what happens. Who knows: You may just uncover the job of your dreams.
