How to Love Your Job and Working Life
I was first given the advice to “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” when I was 16. It sounds great, very motivational, but not terribly practical. Even when you’re lucky enough to do work you love, there is no denying that it is still work. And work is hard.
There are so many challenges we face at work that it can be all too easy to fall out of love with your job. And what about everyone else who is still looking for work that they love?
Is it possible to have a work life you love?
So many of us are stuck in our ways of working that we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that we just need to suck it up. No matter how stuck in a rut we may feel.
We often ask ourselves questions such as:
How can I be successful at work?
Should I look for a new job?
Is it even possible to enjoy work?
What am I doing wrong?
We go round and round without ever coming up with an answer. This can go on for years. Even entire careers!
Thankfully, many of the obstacles that we face at work each day are quite often all of our own making without even realising it. I’m not talking about not pulling our weight or working hard enough. I mean that they are simply all in our head!
You may ask, ‘what do you mean, that I’m making them up’?
Well, in a sense yes! But the effect is that they have a very real negative effect on how we are in the workplace. Humans have a great capacity for creativity and imagination but left unchecked, it can run amok and lead us into believing or fabricating situations that don’t actually exist.
When we realise that these unhelpful thinking patterns - or cognitive biases - are what are really standing in our way of getting what we want out of life, not only do we have a great sense of relief but we become empowered to make positive changes to our ways of thinking.
Let me explain...
How we all can succeed in work and life
Humankind is blessed with the most amazing gift, our brains which are unique in the animal kingdom. They are quite literally what set us apart from the animal world.
Our incredible ways of thinking (along with opposable thumbs!) have seen homo sapiens take amazing strides in cognitive development over the last 100,000 years. For example, the dinosaurs lived for 165 million years and last walked the earth 65 million years ago. In contrast, in just 17,000 years we have evolved from etching rock art in caves to the ability to go into space, and come safely back again.
I believe each and every one of us can do amazing things!
So, why is it then that some people seem to have all the luck while the rest of us slave away?
Imagination is a powerful tool, but it can quite easily get out of our control.
Harnessing your better ways of thinking
Think about a situation you are experiencing right now at work. What do you see? Is it a positive situation where everything goes your way or do you see it playing out with you holding the pointy end of the stick?
In my experience, the latter is more likely. This is purely because humans are risk-averse. We need a safe environment to survive so we have evolved to look for risks (or creatures with sharp teeth) so we can stay alive.
Marketing legend Seth Godin, who knows a thing or two about psychology, explains it well in his bestselling book, ‘The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly’.
““It’s what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame ... The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view.””
But when we are at work, apart from normal safe and healthy issues, the risks are actually very low. By always looking on the negative side, as so many of us are programmed to do, we are blind to all the opportunities that exist around us.
For example, we might not take the compliment from our boss as a sign of a job well done or as an opportunity to leverage it to our advantage. Instead, we think, ‘Phew, I’ve still got a job this week’. This unhelpful way of thinking puts us on the backfoot every single day.
No wonder we feel stuck!
Adopting an open mindset
Our mindset affects the actions we make every day. The concept of mindsets was first identified by psychologist Carol Dweck in ‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success’. In her acclaimed book, Carol explains that there are two main types of mindset: fixed or open.
When we have a fixed mindset, we believe that we are limited by the abilities we are born with. And that, at a certain point, we can go no further. On the other hand, those with an open mindset believe that anything is possible with enough hard work and if you put your mind to it.
“In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, and working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful.”
Adopting an open mindset can help you become more resilient, enabling you to overcome obstacles that would deter someone with a closed or fixed mindset.
What do you truly want out of life?
When we feel frustrated, stuck, underappreciated, or stressed, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. To take a step back, we need to put in the hard yards and dig deep into what is going on in our heads.
I work with people every day to activate their best ways of thinking (cognitive assets). Sometimes, the simple act of saying out loud what is going on in your head can help you find a way forward. Go on and try it now - ask yourself:
What do I want out of life?
What is important to me?
What do I need to change in order to achieve my goals?
What do I want more of and what do I want less of?
How you can have a work life you love
Our unhelpful thought patterns become so deeply ingrained that we don’t even realise what we are doing. It can be hard to unravel these thought processes without help. I work with people to identify their cognitive biases, such as helping them learn to appreciate their strengths and work on overcoming their weaknesses, for example communicating better with their colleagues and superiors.
Together we can address:
What essential soft skills do you need to improve your decision making as a leader
How to increase your self-awareness and self-control.
Your strengths, weaknesses and capabilities.
How to recognise when your mindset and thinking patterns are undermining your success.
Develop a deeper connection with yourself.
I help set people on a path to help them find enjoyment, and dare I say it, work they love!
A client story: How I helped Ryan conquer his fear of success
No, that’s not a typo. I do mean fear of success and not fear of failure. When Ryan, a software engineer (whose name has been changed for confidentiality), came to me he was thinking about quitting his job and wanted help finding a new one. Ryan was a dedicated hard worker. He was the first to work every day and often the last to leave. All the projects he worked on were a huge success.
He felt he was a shoo-in for management but whenever he applied for a senior role, he was turned down. When Ryan came to me, he was thinking of quitting as he was fed up of being passed over again.
The options facing Ryan were:
A. Find another job and see if he had better luck there.
B. Look at what was standing in his way of promotion.
After his initial free consultation, Ryan realised that there were plenty of things he liked about where he was currently working and agreed that what would really benefit him was career development training so he enrolled on my leadership training programme.
From here we were able to look at the mindset issues that were getting in Ryan’s way of promotion. Whilst Ryan excelled at the hard skills required to do his highly technical job, he hadn’t been aware that he also needed to work on his soft skills.
Ryan had fallen into the common trap of thinking that if he wanted it done right, he had to do it himself!
This meant that he quite often took on tasks that other people could do. Leaving him feeling overworked. Stressed out. And irritable. The more times he was passed over for promotion the harder he worked, further entrenching these unhelpful ways of thinking.
Together, we were able to identify a couple of thinking habits, or mindsets, that were driving his choices. And that these choices were why he felt continually overworked and leading him to experience the accompanying stress.
By exploring this more, Ryan realised that there were other outcomes that he hadn’t noticed:
By doing all the work himself he wasn’t giving his team the opportunity to develop.
He was creating the impression that he was not material for promotion because of how he showed up at work.
His personal life suffered in terms of family life, his relationship and his own self-care.
Together we worked on:
Identifying the situations that triggered this kind of thinking.
Exploring what thoughts and feelings were driving the reactions such as when he decided to do it all himself.
Learning ways to interrupt this automatic reaction and use his best ways of thinking to become more intentional about being more responsive and choosing a different way forward.
At first, Ryan found it challenging to interrupt the unhelpful patterns and struggled to identify, interrupt and pivot. With time and practice though, he got better at it until he had an ‘Aha!’ moment.
For me, this is the most satisfying part of being a leadership coach, when all the hard work pays off and we get to the truth of the matter. For Ryan, this was when he internalised that it was himself who was unconsciously sabotaging his chances of success because deep in his heart he was worried that if he were promoted, he would fail.
It was much easier for Ryan to focus on what he knew he excelled at, rather than allowing himself to take risks. Once Ryan had had this reality check, he was able to tackle what was driving this fear and put in place practical steps that he could take to overcome this.
Following Ryan’s breakthrough, he began to notice real improvements at work. The thing that he commented on the most though was that it wasn’t only his working life that had seen positive changes such as being given more responsibility.
Other areas of his life, that he hadn’t even realised were suffering because of his ways of thinking, improved too. He found that he was invited to more social events and is now much happier. At last, after putting in a lot of hard work on himself rather than at work, Ryan has found the fulfilment that was missing from his life for so long.
Fall in love with your work
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