Enjoying Work
Any significant achievement requires consistent long term focussed efforts while facing and overcoming challenges and failures. It is also humanly impossible to maintain a sustained long time effort without enjoying what we do on a day to day basis. Unless we are hoping to win a lottery and solve all your problems magically, the world will pull your hopes and dreams into chaos and we will constantly be fighting disappointments and have to put in more effort than planned to save the day. There are many different types of lotteries we all hope to win. Wanting to get lucky in business, relationships or money and not having to face challenges or failures are lotteries we all are secretly hoping for.
In the beginning of our career, while we are still developing our skills and sense of self worth, fire fighting and saving the day will bring us a lot of satisfaction. On such days, we go home with a sense of self satisfaction and assurance that we did things that no one ever could. It boosts our self image and gives us self confidence. Over time we will develop a hero identity, where we become the essential hero every situation needs. This habit builds up and situations where we can’t be the hero are not appealing to us anymore. We start to approach all situations where we need to be the hero, without which work is not fun anymore.
But as we grow in our career and assume leadership roles, this habit will rob us of the freedom we need to take care of our other psychological needs at work; namely finding peace and joy in the act of work itself. Work is not meant only for creating our sense of self worth through outcomes, but work is also a means for humans to just enjoy our days. One has the need to feel joy in the simple act of doing things that are enjoyable in themselves. Doing enjoyable work energises us and makes us stronger to face challenging situations at work with confidence. It gives us the joy and glow we often see successful people display even amidst challenging times. On the other hand, if we rob ourselves of this joy, over time we become weak. We become only a shadow of our former stronger selves remains. Then we feel guilty for being weak when we need to be strong and the negativity compounds.
I have three three steps that have made work more and more joyful and energizing for me that I would like to share.
First, we give ourselves the freedom to do things for the sake of simple joy and fun they bring into our lives. We all can be guilty of accommodating things in our day that are made up of other people’s asks more than we should. Helping someone do their tasks well, or getting them unstuck or preventing them from going off in the wrong direction, all of these take up our time and energy. But are we enjoying doing these things?
How often do we ask ourselves, is the thing I am going to do next enjoyable for me? Will it bring me joy? Will I have fun while doing it? I reckon, almost never. We probably believe that catering to our inner need for joy at work is somehow unjust and selfish. But in my assessment this is the energiser that creates far superior results.
In order to drink from this fountain of joy, first, we need to be deliberate about planning our day to include tasks we will enjoy. We allocate sufficient time for such activities. When we plan our tasks for that day, ask ourselves this: “Is this something I want to do now? Will I be happy to do this today? Am I excited to do this now?”
If the answer is “no” to all our tasks, however, we are en route to deepening your unhappiness at work. If the answer is “yes”, however, we are going to come out of them more and more positive and energised. I recommend that half of our time be allocated to such tasks. This may not be possible on days of crisis. But on a regular day, this is possible and recommended. For me, thinking deeply about problems, reflecting on if I am addressing the problems the right way, preparing for meetings, writing, designing solutions, learning, processing my disappointments or failures, are all enjoyable and energising activities. Each one of us has our own recipe of tasks that we enjoy. We become deliberate in adding these to our day, preferably at the start of the day.
In just a few days of making this one simple change, we start showing amazing results on how we feel at work. We start enjoying our work and feel more energised. We can’t wait to get back to our desks for the next day. This energy will compound and create confidence in dealing with challenges and increase our self esteem in our own eyes.
Second, when we do these tasks, we need to monitor from time to time if these tasks are really bringing joy to us. We have to stop and ask ourselves; tap our experience and see if what we thought would bring us joy, is really true or not. This is very important. Doing a quick recap, (or even giving yourself a rating) on how much you enjoyed yourself on a task-by-task or day-to-day basis is crucial to monitor if you are really enjoying your work. Oftentimes we don’t understand what brings us joy well enough. We will also observe that what we find joyful changes over time and situations. As we start analysing and paying more attention to what kind of activities bring us joy, we start developing a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationship with work. This self understanding is a terrific long term advantage and will only deepen over time.
Thirdly, it is often the case that we don’t enjoy doing even otherwise enjoyable activities, because our mind is cluttered with fear & stress of other unrelated things. Anyone who has been on a holiday while things at work are going downhill can relate. Even though we are in midst of beautiful sceneries, we are pulled into the negativity of things going downhill at work. Enjoyment is not a physical condition, but an internal state. The human mind is often painfully cluttered with fear, crisis, disappointments and failures of various kinds. In such a state, we forget all about enjoying our work. We forget that enjoying work is an essential psychological daily need we all have.
Fear and stress corrode all our experiences. Our hero habits often wire our brains to respond only to crises. Our motivation engine has gotten used to responding only to fear. Without fear, we can’t act. Many times, we either wait for a crisis to appear or at least try to find a crisis in every situation to which the hero within us can respond. Students who study one day before an exam display this dependence on fear as the only motivator that gets them to act.
To counter this, we have to resolve our dependence on fear as the only motivator. We do this not just by resolving the underlying situation that is creating fear. We are programmed to put effort in solving our own problems, more or less automatically. But we are not programmed to monitor how our emotions are impacting our life experience. Hence, we should put additional effort in understanding fear itself. We do this, by becoming aware of our fear & stress and their impact on us. Fear corrodes away at the quality of our time and keeps chipping away at our effectiveness. Actions that are driven by fear are far inferior in impact than actions that are guided by joy and fun. Changing the way we respond to fear & stress is essential to having a good and effective work life.
I have found journaling to be an excellent antidote to fear and its disabling effect. When I journal I find that the hold fear has on me reduces. For others, the antidote to fear could be mediation. Any method that works for us is acceptable. But it’s essential to become aware of fear and go deeper into it.