When the Thrill Is Gone
Sometimes we have a love-hate relationship with our jobs. This feeling may cause you to think that you need to change jobs when what you really need to change is your relationship with your job. How can you do that? By working on it. Here are some suggestions to help you:
- What about your job still excites you? Is it giving presentations? Is it solving staff difficulties? Is it training and teaching? Is it the way you feel when you finish a project, streamline a process? Find at least one thing about your job that still makes you feel good.
- Focus on yourself. Improve what you do. Why continue to do your job the same old way? Be creative and make things easier for yourself.
- Enrich the quality of your life on the job. What about your coworkers? With which ones could you cultivate or deepen a friendship? Don’t know? Take time to find out, and then work on these relationships. They add depth and positive feelings to your work life.
- Don’t take criticism personally. Look at it as feedback, another person’s perception. See it as another person’s analysis of your work, not something carved in stone about you personally.
- Make an analysis of your own. Write down all the areas that cause stress on the job. Some of them you may be able to change; some of them you may not be able to change. But at least you’ll know concretely and exactly what these stressors are instead of perceiving one big, all-consuming bundle of stress.
- Notice where you’re disorganized. Make a to-do list, have a place for everything and everything in its place, prioritize tasks and problems, organize your office and your work flow.
- Don’t let yourself stagnate. Increase your skills and competencies on the job and off the job. Take a class you have an interest in; join a group of some kind. As you grow, you may find you like your job much better, or you may find something else you’d rather do, someplace else you’d rather work. Either way, you’ll feel better if you’re growing. There’s definitely excitement in that.
- Don’t be work obsessed. Spend part of your time in activities you enjoy that are not work related. Fun with family and friends should not be a secondary part of your life. If they are, you’re living an unbalanced life. No wonder you feel dissatisfied.
- Find your bliss. The secret of happiness is not in getting the things you like but in liking the things you get. Another side to this is that you are more likely to get things you like when you close down your self-pity party and change what you can and build on what you enjoy. Live your life according to what you want. And accept that other people’s wants sometimes conflict with yours. That doesn’t make you trapped. That makes you tap your own creativity and live your life to the fullest.
Sanjay Sabarwal's Blog 