Try to rate the feeling of your work on a scale of 10 to XNUMX. And then think about what you can change to improve your score. For one point. For two. On three…
Alexey Ulanovsky, psychologist, coach, associate professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.
More than a third of our adult life we are busy with work. It is a powerful source of good mood or disappointment, elation or stress, fullness of life or devastation. Moreover, work is not about money at all, it is about life. Choosing a job is choosing yourself.
The paradox of work is that the highest moments of satisfaction, self-realization and pride can be associated with it, but at the same time we spend a lot of time and effort on it, and often would prefer something else to it*. Hence the familiar experience of “Friday evening” – the anticipation of freedom and leisure. What does it take to love your job?
1. Meaning.
It is important that what we do is meaningful to us, connected to our deepest values. Ideally, while working, we would realize the personal, formulated by us Mission. The long execution of tasks that are meaningless to us is a sophisticated torture. From meaning comes our deep satisfaction with life.
2. Strengths.
Each of us has our own talents or at least developed skills: the ability to communicate, the ability to analyze, creativity, attention to detail … If we have the opportunity to show and make the most of them in our work, we feel that we are realizing our potential.
3. Positive emotions.
In your favorite work there is always a place for joy and pleasure. If work brings us only stress, anxiety, loss of strength and a sense of hopelessness, this is an occasion to figure out what we can change in this situation.
4. Challenge.
For work to be exciting for us, the tasks we solve should not be too easy for us. They have to reflect our “level of difficulty” otherwise we get bored. The task should go beyond our comfort zone, but not so far as to cause anxiety and self-doubt.
5. Hope.
Where do we see ourselves in 5 years? What image of our future inspires us? Charles Snider, a well-known researcher of hope, defined it as “the belief that the future will be better than the present.” Our understanding of the place and meaning of what we are doing now in the general context of our lives is another way to love our work.
* For more details, see M. Csikszentmihalyi “In Search of Flow” (Alpina non-fiction, 2013) and an interview with M. Csikszentmihalyi.