What To Do If You Don’t Love Your Job

A very Happy New Year to you and welcome to my first blog, not just of the year, but of a whole new decade.

This is a great time to review how you feel about your working life. I know you can do it any time, but after a break is a good time to check in with yourself about what your feelings are about work.

Do it right now!

Think back to last night. What were your feelings knowing that you were going to work the next morning? Which of the following best describes how you felt?

• Anxious
• Calm
• Confident
• Frustrated
• Irritated
• Happy
• Sad
• Stressed
• Uncertain

Think back over the last three or four months of 2019. On a scale of 0 to 10 (where 0 is never and 10 is every time), how often did you feel each of those on a Sunday night before going to work on a Monday? If you work a different pattern, think about the night before you went to work after a couple of days break.

Take a moment to review your responses. Were you mostly positive and looking forward to work? Or were you feeling a lot of negativity and distress about going to work?

Remember that your emotions are there to inform you. As my good friend, colleague, and Emotional Intelligence expert, Lisa Allen of Islanda puts it “emotions are just data”. How would you like to feel about work and your job? Take a moment to write that down, or at least stop and put it into words. How does that compare with how you’ve regularly felt over the last few months?

If there’s a mismatch, ask yourself this: what can I do, how could I choose to feel, or how could I look at work differently so that I feel a little bit more like I want to feel about my work and job role?

Lets give you an example:

What was the situation?

A client I worked with last year was in her mid-30s, with a young family and struggling to find any satisfaction or fulfilment in her work. She wanted to find a new direction and new job.

How did we resolve it?

We worked together over six sessions, looking at what inspired her, what an ideal job would look like for her, and how to identify and explore new options. I helped her to explore similar and different roles, different industries and even at self-employment and what that might entail. We looked at what needed to happen in work to support the lifestyle she wanted with her family.

What was the outcome?

By understanding what “floated her boat” in her career, and how she could balance fulfilment at work with family and other activities, she realised that she’s in the right place – for now. But, whilst she enjoys work again now, she also knows that in a couple of years she might want to move on and now has the skills and a strategy to make that move and know when to make it.

Actions for you:

1. If you had a gap between how you want to feel about work and how you actually feel, take action to do something different, or change the way you look at work by focussing on the good things in your job.

2. To explore further, book one of the free discovery sessions I currently offer (click here) to explore what you can do differently. It’s free and will only take 20 minutes.

It all links to one of my favourite mindsets: If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

So, if you’re not enjoying work and you seriously want things to change, you have to do something.

If you want to explore more about how your mindset can help you have less stress at work, explore my August Blog series:

Aug 5^th: Being in charge of your emotions

Aug 12^th: Setting boundaries and achieving work-life balance

Aug 19^th:  Finding calm and reducing stress

Aug 26^th: Three actions for a success mindset