Two and a half years ago I posted the article “6 Ways to Be Happy at a Job You Don’t Like.” Today it belatedly occurred to me that it could be helpful to talk about what makes a job truly fulfilling–that is, instead of talking about making a better situation out of a job that doesn’t feel like a good fit, addressing how a job can provide the greatest amount of satisfaction and enjoyment. I know of five things that can make key differences here.

Competence
This may be self-evident, but given that self-reliance and contributing positively to a group are basic to self-confidence and happiness, competence in a job seems to be a near-essential part of the job being satisfying. Fortunately skill and mastery can usually be developed through deliberate practice,  so that almost any jobs we’re enthusiastic about can in time become jobs we’re great at. The exceptions are jobs that require some kind of innate attribute, like tallness or very good hearing.

Meaning
Meaning contributes to happiness and fulfillment by creating a feeling of being involved in something positive and larger than the individual. If I could do the exact same kind of work in two jobs, but in one I would be part of an organization that didn’t do anything I cared about and in the other was helping make the world a better place (by my definition), I’m very likely to be happier with the second job. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how some jobs contribute to the world, especially when the worker is a functionary in a much larger system designed only to yield profit. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s time to quit your corporate job and go live on peanuts working for your favorite non-profit. On the other hand, if you’re profoundly dissatisfied with your job, that might be exactly what it means.

Engagement
I’ve talked in a number of posts about psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s  concept of flow, a state in which a person is both highly productive and absolutely attentive to the work at hand. This kind of engagement–or even its milder relations–can make a profound difference in job satisfaction, because engaging in challenging work and doing well at it yields pleasure and satisfaction. Thus one way to enjoy work more is to find a way to minimize or cluster distractions and interruptions in order to be able to work with exceptional focus and involvement.

People
It’s possible for us to enjoy jobs almost regardless of other considerations if  we really like our coworkers. Of course, the reverse is also true: a coworker who inspires hate or fear can single-handedly wreck any enjoyment we may get from a job. Fortunately, finding meaningful and engaging work often lands us with like-minded people who will appreciate our priorities, opinions, and personalities.

Surroundings
Surroundings can drag a job down or boost it high up. A workplace that feels peaceful, attractive, comfortable, and encouraging creates reasons to want to show up every morning, while a depressing, unpleasant, cramped, uncomfortable, or distasteful workplace creates reasons to call in sick.

It’s difficult–sometimes impossible–to find or create a job that hits the mark on all five of these points, but many jobs can be improved in at least one respect, and taking stock of all five may, I hope, provide some insights on how well your job–present or potential–measures up.

Photo by mangostani

I try to steer clear of posting a lot of personal theories here, but bear with me, because if I put together evidence from a variety of sources and make a leap of faith or two, I find myself faced with a pretty solid-looking explanation of how people succeed at making self-employment pay the bills, get new businesses to succeed, sell novels, and otherwise find ways to connect their passions with their paychecks.

It’s three fairly simple steps–though unfortunately, this is one of those cases where simple and easy don’t mean exactly the same thing. Are the steps readily understandable? Yes. Is there an excellent chance you and I can do them? Also yes. Would the process be quick and convenient? Hell no.

Step 1. Practice and get feedback
A huge body of solid research has been done on people who are exceptionally good at all kinds of things, from sports to music to business to law enforcement and beyond, and one of the conclusions that appears to be inescapable is this: people who get in tons of deliberate practice–that is, focused effort to improve with careful attention to results (see “Practice vs. Deliberate Practice” and “Do you have enough talent to become great at it?“) get very good, and people who don’t get in deliberate practice don’t. To keep this post short, I’ll let you investigate (or not) as you’re inclined to, but in case you haven’t already come across the information, I’d like to urge you to glance at the above articles and consider the books they point to if you are interested in being great at anything. Inborn talent is a misleading explanation we’ve come up with for a process that really isn’t that mysterious.

Feedback is even harder than practice, because while you can simply decide to practice something, you can’t force other people to carefully consider your work and give you their honest opinion of it. Too, most of the people who like you enough to do that are too biased to be able to provide an impartial opinion. However, feedback is essential in order to be sure you’re practicing the right things and to tell you how far you’re getting. It also makes the process of practicing much more compelling and fun (see “Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated” and “Some Steps for Getting into a State of Flow“).

It’s tempting to want to skip step 1. After all, it takes years to get really excellent at something. Fortunately, skipping is sometimes possible if your business or job doesn’t require any special skills for the entry level. If you want to excel in retail sales or to work your way up the ladder in a business that always needs new people, you may not need to practice anything before you start: you can learn on the job.

However, if you want to live by writing novels or making robots or coordinating a fleet of moped couriers, you probably have some real study ahead of you–or if you’ve been practicing for years, already behind you.

Step 2. Choose something you love
If you’re doing something for its own sake, then there will be rewards regardless of whether or not you’re financially successful any time soon. You’ll have reasons to keep with it through the hard times, you’ll think about it more often (and therefore come up with better and deeper ideas about it), and you’ll enjoy yourself even when no one is paying you. Since very often becoming successful enough to get paid at something means doing it for nothing or next-to-nothing for a quite a while first, this is a major advantage.

For one practical example of this idea (though applied to fitness rather than income), see “Finding Exercise You Love: The Taekwondo Example.”

Step 3. Be willing to work at it for a long time
This may be the hardest part: say you’ve become really terrific at something and have found a way to combine a passion with an income opportunity. Many times, at this point, the money does not flow at the beginning. Sometimes it doesn’t flow for years. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected a dozen times before Bloomsbury bought it. (See accounts of other multiply-rejected successful authors at this link.) Founders of new businesses, unless they already have control over a lot of money, often have to work for a long time with no income to get to the point of viability, to say nothing of profitability. Artists, like musicians and novelists, often have even longer to wait.

In 1983, actor Jim Carey reportedly wrote a check to himself for ten million dollars–and postdated it ten years in the future. This is the kind of commitment and long-term thinking that tends to foster a certain amount of success. Doing a very good James T. Kirk impression also doesn’t hurt.

Yes those who don’t persist hardly ever triumph. Business is difficult. Writing a good novel is difficult. Convincing people that you should be their massage therapist is difficult. Those who don’t continue to believe in themselves and what they’re doing, persisting because they love their work and knowing they have something worthwhile because they’ve gotten feedback on their practice efforts, can stay in the game long enough to actually make it work.

It’s true, of course, that some people get discovered in Hollywood the week after they roll into town; some novelists get big deals from publishers as soon as they finish their first books; and some businesses start making real money right out of the gate. Sometimes time isn’t necessary. However, those are the exceptions: the Steve Jobs and Stephen Kings of the world didn’t find instant success, and we’re not likely to either. But if we’re doing something well, something we love, then we can afford to wait.

Photo by eszter

Following up on last week’s articles “Dealing With Problems That Can’t Be Fixed” and “When Is It Time to Make a Change?“, today’s article takes a look at the possibilities and consequences of fixing a situation by leaving it.

When there’s no way to get away
Leaving isn’t always an option. For example, if the problem is affecting a place, person, or group of people you care about–say, your brother-in-law has a drinking problem, or your hometown has gone into a bad economic slump–then getting isn’t likely to help. Even when leaving the problem behind physically won’t help, though, it’s sometimes possible to leave emotionally, which is to say stop caring about the situation. Ceasing to care about things is often not a helpful approach, and even when it is advisable, it isn’t always easy. Yet ceasing to care can sometimes be the best choice, especially if an activity or relationship is involved that wasn’t that healthy or appropriate in the first place, as with ending a friendship with someone who’s been a destructive influence.

What’s lost, what’s gained, and what the break will cost
When leaving is an option, it can help to become clear on the three kinds of things that are affected when we leave a situation: what’s lost by leaving the situation behind, what’s gained by leaving it, and what damage (or benefits) might result from the leaving itself. For instance, leaving a job can be a way of ending an intolerable work relationship with a boss or coworker (a key cause of unhappiness at work, according to the Gallup Group’s investigations on well-being) but may cause uncertainty with your income, increase or decrease your commute, open up new opportunities, threaten rifts between you and others still working at or with the place you left, create a situation that will tend to make a spouse relieved or fearful, and so on. Not all of these costs and benefits may be apparent at the beginning, and some will not be predictable, such as unexpected opportunities and the emotional impact of the change.

Ways to think about leaving
One of the most useful things we can do when thinking about leaving a situation is to bring to light all of our fears, concerns, and hopes that may make us want to leave or stay and to try to find any broken ideas (thoughts that cause bad feelings by misleading us in subtle ways) that may be causing pain now, preventing progress, or threatening the future. Two good ways of bringing out these kinds of thoughts are writing them out on paper or on a computer or talking about the situation with a sympathetic friend who’s a good listener.

Some examples of kinds of thoughts worth looking at:

• Fears of what will happen if you do leave
• Fears of what will happen if you don’t leave
• Assumptions about your current situation that may or may not be accurate
• Concerns about how other people will judge a decision to leave
• Hopes for opportunities that might open up
• Overly-limiting ideas about who you are and what you’re capable of doing
• People who would be affected by a change, including whether it’s you or someone else who would be most affected
• What kinds of life complications would go away or be added by leaving

A “pros and cons” list can be useful, but it’s unlikely to provide an obvious answer, even if the list is much longer on one side than the other, since different items in a list can have very different levels of importance. Seeing the two sides of the issue laid out like this, though, can make it much easier to balance out the the possibilities the situation offers, provided all the key points are covered. One very useful approach is to spend days or even weeks coming back to the list and adding to it whenever new ideas occur, then considering both sides carefully and sleeping on it, letting a decision emerge naturally.

As far as I can tell, most Americans consider it normal to be unhappy with their jobs. The idea seems to be that you have to put in your time during the week, suffer through having to do tasks you don’t feel like doing, then get in some fun over the weekend if you can.

This is not a recipe for happiness. After all, most of us spend a huge proportion of our waking time working. If we don’t like our work, than that’s a lot of time spent unhappy and stressed.

For some people, certainly, the solution is getting a different job, even if expenses need to be scaled back to make that possible. But the key to happiness in a job isn’t always what we’re doing: sometimes it’s just how engaged we are.

The new Gallup book (from the people who do the polls), Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter, makes the argument based on extensive research that a fulfilling life is one where a person is doing well in five areas: career, social, physical, financial, and community. “Career” in this case can mean employment, self-employment, full-time parenting–even a hobby. Regardless, happiness in a career turns out to have a lot to do with engagement.

Rath and Harter distinguish between people who are generally engaged in their jobs (interested in what they’re doing, focused, involved) and people who generally aren’t (distracted, waiting for the day to end, dissatisfied, bored). They employed a series of pretty clever tracking techniques, including a device that would beep at certain times during the day and prompt subjects to record what they were doing and how they were feeling about it; heart rate monitors; and monitoring cortisol levels in saliva. (Cortisol is a chemical in the body that is closely linked with stress.) From these and other data, they offer a chart measuring happiness over the working day for an average engaged person versus an average not-engaged person.

Of course the people who were engaged were happier, but the specific comparison is striking. Unengaged people come in unhappy, get unhappier after the first hour or so, become more interested and less unhappy during the middle of the day, and then experience a slide in happiness throughout the afternoon that only stops with a sudden burst of comparative happiness at the very end. The least unhappy point in the day for these folks? Quitting time.

By contrast, the engaged people are as happy when they walk in the door in the morning as unengaged people were at the end of the day–and the engaged people keep getting happier from there. The most tedious and unpleasant time in an engaged person’s average day as happy as the most thrilling time in an unengaged person’s day! Weirdly, people who are trying to entertain and distract themselves at work by stretching coffee breaks out and reading e-mailed jokes are having much, much less fun than people who are getting excited about their work.

Admittedly, it’s not always easy to get excited about one’s work. It’s especially hard if you have a manager you don’t like, if you’re doing something you don’t believe in, if you have serious concerns about how the organization operates, if you don’t like your coworkers, or if you don’t have what you need to do your job effectively. In these situations, it might make sense to look for a new job.

In other situations, it can be interesting to ask yourself “What could I do to feel more involved and interested in my work?” There are some suggestions in my article 6 Ways to Be Happy at a Job You Don’t Like.

Photo by oso

There are two common kinds of advice I’ve heard given to people who don’t like their jobs. One is “suck it up,” which is pragmatic but not very inspiring. The other is “then get a different job,” which is inspiring but not always pragmatic. In this post, I won’t attempt to untangle the question of when it is or isn’t a good idea to leave your job, although sometimes that may be the best call. Instead, let’s say that you’ve decided you want to stay at your current job, and the only problem is, your job is a drag. Is it possible to be happy even if you’re spending 40 hours a week (or more) doing something you don’t like? Often it is. Other people are living happy lives despite lousy jobs. Why not you?

1. Remember Why You’re There
It’s nice to have a job, to be paid, and to have something to do. You might have other reasons for your job as well. Getting in touch with them dispels the false idea that we’re forced to be at work. Sure we need to work to get money to live (most of us, anyway). But there are people who don’t have the work or the money, and it’s nice not to be in that situation.

2. Know What You Don’t Like
As with most situations where we have negative emotions, one of the first and most important steps is mindfulness. When we find ourselves reacting negatively to a situation and want to change that reaction, it helps (a lot) to figure out where the reaction is coming from. Sometimes the answers are fairly obvious (“I don’t like it when my boss comes into my office every five minutes to ask about something”) and sometimes they’re may be something that you haven’t consciously considered before (“Come to think of it, it’s this depressing room that’s bothering me the most.”) If your job isn’t satisfying to you, there’s probably more than one reason. Pay attention to your thoughts whenever you’re feeling most unhappy: this leads you to the causes.

3. Change the Details
Improving your actual job situation–negotiating a raise, getting transferred to another group, trading some responsibilities, etc.–is too big a topic to go into in detail here, but it’s well worth thinking about. Would better tools help you enjoy your work more? Creating more social ties with coworkers? Making your work environment more welcoming? Taking on more responsibilities? Sharing certain jobs with coworkers?

It’s not unsual to feel as though certain kinds of situations are unchangeable, only to find out that a simple request or a new approach can change them in important ways. Look for these kinds of opportunities.

4. Fix Broken Ideas
As human beings, we have evolved amazingly sophisticated mental systems for making ourselves miserable. Very often, we tell ourselves false (though true-sounding) stories in an ongoing mental commentary. Some examples are things like “She should have done that last week,” “I’m completely miserable here,” “This project is doomed to fail,” and “They all think I’m an idiot for forgetting about the presentation.” These broken ideas can be repaired by restating them as factually as possible, for instance “It would have been easier for me if she had done that last week, but she’s not always going to do things the way I’d like.” Broken ideas create tension and stress. Repairing them allows us to let go of negative ideas that are dragging us down.

5. Get Into Flow
The ultimate way to enjoy your work is to learn to get into a state of flow with it as often as possible. Flow is a state in which you’re challenged, but within your abilities; you’re able to focus without distractions or interruptions on a task; and you’re getting moment-to-moment feedback of some kind on how well you’re doing. Being in flow means being absorbed in the work and losing track of time because you’re so interested and involved. Not everything can be done in flow, but while it may be easier to imagine it working for surfers and violinists, it also can work beautifully if you’re washing dishes, filling out paperwork, or repairing a lawnmower.

Some tips on getting into a flow state are here. The most useful thing I can say about flow in a single sentence is that it only happens when you’re focusing on one thing, not when you’re allowing yourself to be distracted, or when you’re stopping and starting different tasks. Having fun while working, surprisingly, turns out to be easiest when you are working hard and efficiently.

6. Find a Goal
Flow experiences and most other kinds of enjoyable activity require having a goal (or goals). Just responding to things as they come is not generally an effective way to seek happiness. Even if your goal is just to improve your turnaround time by 5 minutes or to find something positive to say in every customer interaction, it allows you to focus and think about it rather than about boring, distracting, or tedious details that might otherwise take up your attention.

If you’re not happy at work it may be that you should consider another kind of job, but whatever position you have, there will very likely be parts you don’t enjoy. By remembering your reasons, knowing what’s behind your dissatisfaction, making the most of your work environment, fixing broken ideas, aiming to get into flow, and finding goals, you’ll have the best chance of being happier with your work … and taking those positive feelings with you when you go home.

Photo by chinogypsie

After losing a job, motivation can be a little hard to come by. A lost job usually serves up a double whammy: a massive blow to self-respect in being fired, forced to resign, or laid off, and a goodly serving of uncertainty about where the next job is going to come from. The combination of sadness about the past and anxiety about the future can be pernicious, because just when you get one side of the problem under control, the other can sneak up and wallop you.

I was forwarded this useful article from the New York Times Web site today, and it has some good points to make: “Accentuating the Positive After a Layoff“. While reading it, however, I realized there are some basic elements of motivation that apply to job loss: here those are.

If You’re Beating Yourself Up, Here’s How to Stop
It’s hard to be kind to yourself after losing a job. You may blame yourself, for good reasons or silly reasons, or be unable to let go of anger, or feel hopeless about the future. These kinds of feelings almost always are the result of broken ideas, things we tell ourselves that sound true but are actually bunk. Some common ones follow, along with some good ways to repair them. For a much more in-depth treatment of broken ideas (under their more proper psychological name of “cognitive distortions”), read Albert Ellis and Robert A. Harper’s A Guide to Rational Living or David Burns’ Feeling Good.

I should have _____
“Should” is almost always a red flag word. Looking back at the past, it helps to know how we would handle a similar situation in the future, but since there is no way at all ever to change what we’ve done in time gone by, it can be a lot more constructive to say “I did ____. If the situation came up again, I would do ____. I’m going to accept that I made a bad choice. What can I do in the future to help turn things around?”

I’m such a ____
Labeling means taking one or more incidents in the past and concluding that they add up to an unchangeable tendency to fail. Yet our brains are amazingly adaptable; we can change virtually anything we want about our behavior or even our skills. A bad choice or a failure is nothing more than a specific bad choice or failure. It doesn’t decree how we will act in future.

My boss/coworkers/clients/etc. should have _____
“Should” again, and again it points to something we can’t change. We can influence others, but we generally can’t force them to act a particular way. It can help in these situations to remind ourselves that we have no control over other people, only control over how we respond to them. We can then turn our attention to the areas of our lives where we actually do have some control.

I’m not going to find a job/decent job/job around here/job in my field
This one is called “fortune telling.” We can’t predict the future, and there’s no point in pretending we can. It can help in these situations to map out all of the possibilities we’re hoping to avoid and say to ourselves “OK, that might happen, even if I don’t want it to. If so, what’s going to be the best thing for me to do?”

This is awful!
Watching a child die is awful. Being imprisoned in  a tiny cell in a Southeast Asian country for eight years is awful. But having to sell your beloved late-model car and move to a second-floor walkup in a town you don’t like is merely unpleasant. If you look at your future and see things you don’t like, remind yourself that they’re just things you don’t like, and that your job is just to make good decisions. Very few things we don’t like will last through our entire lives. Generally they’re just something to be gotten through as well as can be managed until they’re gone.

Make goals, not wishes
It’s tempting in these situations to make goals like “I will get a new job right here in the city within three months, for at least as much as I used to make.” The problem is that something like that is not a goal, because it’s not under your direct control. It’s more of a wish: it depends on other people doing things, and we’ve already established that other people are (inconveniently) not under our control. Goals are motivating and worth pursuing, as long as they’re entirely under your control. A real goal might be something like “I will apply for at least 15 jobs a week,” or “I will study a new job skill for at least two hours a day until I have a new job,” or “Every morning, I will come up with one new thing I haven’t tried yet to help me in my job search.” As mentioned in the S.M.A.R.T. post, good goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The “attainable” part needs to include being under your direct control.

There is an up side
Any change, even a very messy one, has the potential for positive side effects, sometimes substantial ones. For instance, many people who have lost their ability to walk, see, or hear through an accident literally refer to their experience as the best thing that has ever happened to them. As strange as it may sound, it can make sense, because a major life problem is a wake-up call: it slaps us in the face and forces us to look around. What do we really have going for us, when it comes right down to it–what skills, what passions, what resources? What do we truly want to do with our lives? Is making a living enough, or do we want something more? If so, what is that thing? Are the choices we’ve been making really making us happy? It’s possible to be happy without a lot of things, including sight, hearing, and the ability to walk. A happy life with less is better than an unhappy life with more.

And almost any change also has little benefits, things that you’re probably more than happy to leave behind–a cramped office or an over-controlling manager or a long commute. Don’t hesitate to take pleasure in the improvements in your situation, even if they’re small compared to the problems that have arisen.

You don’t have to be happy about losing a job (though it’s possible, and it can help). And you don’t have to pretend that everything is going to come out the way you want it to just because you wish it (which doesn’t help). But taking a calm look at what has happened and where you are now can at worst help you put to rest anxieties you don’t really need, and at best help you see opportunities you hadn’t previously imagined.

Photo by Rhett Sutphin; it may or may not actually depict a lost job