Feeling stuck at work? 4 Ways to Love a Job You Hate

A place where the sun isn’t shining now will be eliminated in a few hours.
- Sophia Bedford- Pierce

1. Play with perspective

Make a list of what you don’t like about your work. Ask yourself “What’s good?” about each of these items. Feel free to use your sense of humor, be practical, be whimsical, be bold. It’s for your eyes only.

Ex: Too much email – it’s a great distraction from other jobs, at least there are people (or spammers) that want to connect with me, I can avoid an uncomfortable face-to-face conversation with that annoying person down the hall.

2. Lean into the job

Act as if you loved this job, just for 10 minutes. Take your hands off the handle bar of the roller coaster and jump into the job like it was a thrill ride. Imagine it is something you absolutely love to do, like salsa dancing, or going golfing, or having a double mocha latte from Starbucks.

3. Stay curious

Ask yourself open questions. What triggers me most about this job? What is another way I could deal with this job? Could I be delegating it? Could I abandon it? Could I re-systemitize it so that it’s more enjoyable? Could I invite others to do it with me? Could I do it at another time of day so that I’m not interrupted so often?

4. Become exceptional

With this new information now ask yourself “If I were exceptional at loving this job and doing it brilliantly…what would I do?” When I asked myself this question about email overload I decided to make a game of it. I created a system.

First I went through and deleted anything unimportant. Then I color flagged them: red = deal with now, blue = deal with this week, yellow = deal with next week. Emails for reference only I created a separate folder for in my InBox. I used Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software (which makes it go much faster once you get it going). I decided to do this system for only one hour.

After the hour I took a break to actually go get a double mocha latte from Starbucks as a reward

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If you have a way of loving a job you hate, post it below in our comments. ) Or you can email it to carla@carlarieger.com