How To Save A Life
This week The Guardian published a piece that caught my eye as it was titled “Hate your job – but can’t afford to leave? 20 ways to love your work a little more”.
This is what I would call ‘Decrapifying Work for yourself’. It’s not about changing the system, or the organisation you work in, or even the team you work on, because sometimes those things are just impossible to even make a dent in. That’s either because you have so little power and authority that work is just a given, or are so overworked and exhausted you’re are just running on fumes and only focused on survival.
This is not being negative or defeatist, it’s just accepting the reality that you find yourself in. That’s sometimes a very hard thing to do but it’s the essential first step to improving the situation. Once you realise the only things you can affect are your attitude and your feelings, then you can focus what energy you have on those and start a virtuous circle of experience and mood (what Barbara Fredrickson calls ‘Broaden and Build’).
So I should love this article, right? Well, er …
In spirit, yes, but this is actually a grab bag of ideas and suggestions from professionals who have opinions (hey, I’m not knocking it, I’m one myself!), as well as a few readers. Some are good, others are less so, and all are delivered without much context. It’s basically a listicle, with all the limitations of that format.
For example, anything along of the lines of “This worked for me so you should do it” is not going to be relevant to the vast majority who don’t share a similar personality, outlook or context as the person articulating it (obviously, this also applies to vast swathes of self-help books and Internet courses on ‘How to make six figures from sword swallowing’ or ‘How I made 4 billion in 10 weeks, and so can you!’ and similar nonsense). Interesting to read, perhaps, but not much practical use.
Anyway, let’s dive into this smorgasbord of suggestions and sort out the caviar from the pickled whelk.
All Kinds Of Everything
Remind yourself why you wanted the job
This assumes, of course, that you wanted the job in the first place. It is worth thinking back to why you chose your line of work but often we just went with what came up (this is even more true in a tight job market) and followed our nose from there. Even if you liked the work initially, you often end up in a role that is mostly doing ‘managery’ stuff and little of what you enjoy. A more useful question is what would you like to get from your job?
Think about what work gives you
There you go! Almost.
Even if you are in a job you hate, it provides some benefits. A salary, for starters, which enables a certain lifestyle (which may or may not be a positive!). After evaluating it, you may decide an acceptable trade-off is a dull job but a stable personal life. Of course, having identified the trade-off, you may decide it is unacceptable…
Talk to your colleagues
I know, some of you are thinking “Are you mad? Have you met my colleagues?”. What if you have little in common with them, or some real and obvious differences of opinion? What if you just don’t like them, or vice versa? What if somehow any discussion gets back to the bosses, and with a negative twist?
I am all in favour of building connection with colleagues where possible but in many environments you simply don’t have the time, or the act of doing it will be frowned upon and seen as time wasting.
So, yes, but only if you’re in a safe environment. Do it with caution.
Find fun moments
I was always up for a laugh and a joke at work and I encouraged what this article calls ‘benign misconduct’ in my team. Fun is great. However, I know I was judged for it and it was frowned upon by my bosses. Work is not supposed to be fun, it’s meant to be hard and miserable! Again, proceed with caution.
Learn something new outside work
Great idea but subject to finding the time, energy, money and motivation etc. If you’re raising a family, this is going to be challenging, especially for working Mums.
The example given is someone going to Toastmasters and learning public speaking and they say “By seeking skill sets outside work, you will always be honing your craft.” No. If you’re going to do this, do it for yourself. Go and learn to play the euphonium or embroidery or whatever gives you joy. Enough of your life is about work, don’t make your free time about work too.
Change your surroundings
I write this sitting in a local coffee shop shop for exactly this reason. It’s one of the benefits of working flexibly so use it. However, if you’re in a 5-day a week desk farm, your options are limited. If you can, move around and work in other spaces. If you can’t, get up and walk around. If even that is frowned upon, go for a walk at lunchtime. The longer you sit at your desk staring at a screen, the deeper you descend into the slough of despond.
Glow up your workspace
If you have a desk, then fine. It doesn’t really do a lot for me but if you want to fill it with photos and gonks (remember those?), fill your boots. They suggest that if you hot-desk then use a screensaver to show pictures. Only how often do you see your screen saver? And do you really notice it?
Start a journal
OK, so I am 100% behind this. They suggest a gratitude journal, which is a proven way to improve your mood and outlook. I journal more generally to get thoughts out of my head and to stop me ruminating. In the process I have a dialogue with myself that often give me greater clarity on my thoughts and feelings.
Focus on what you enjoy
Assuming you enjoy some of what you do…
Seriously, this is good advice. Our brains naturally focus on the bad stuff and we ignore what’s actually positive. My mate Mark LeBusque tells us that the ‘Bad News’ filing cabinet is 4 times as big as the ‘Good News’ filing cabinet, and urges us to go and look through the latter on a regular basis. Even in the worst job, there’ll be something that you like. Even if it’s just seeing the paycheque hit your bank account every month.
Try to jobcraft …
Jobcrafting is proactively tailoring your job to your strengths, which you may or may not have the latitude to do. It is being proactive and using your agency but you might be too beaten down to do that. However, the precursor to that is to identify your strengths, which is another thing I strongly recommend.
We’re really bad at doing this ourselves because they come easily to us and so we discount them. Ask others what they see as your strengths, and also use some of the online tools to identify strengths. Look at your successes and ask what strengths they demonstrated. Build a picture of what you excel at.
Often, corporate evaluation and development programmes focus on building up your weak areas. This is a mistake, you should instead focus on leveraging your strengths. So get to know them first.
… Or taskcraft!
The suggestion here is to manage your daily work, listing your priorities and reviewing your successes at the end of the day. Yes, it works. Unless your boss comes in on a daily basis and throws everything up in the air. Or they micro-manage so much you can’t decide your priorities. Both are, sadly, all too common.
Apply your strengths in different ways
Yeah, fine. If the organisation supports this, great. However, lots just want you to stay in your box and do what you’re told.
Consider a sideways move
We are so obsessed with linear progression and upwards movement that we are often oblivious to adjacent possibilities. If it gives you the opportunity to try new things and develop new skills, then it could be just the refresh you need.
However, the proviso is that it could make you more of a generic ‘company man’, tying you to the organisation even more and limiting your scope to move elsewhere.
Reward yourself regularly
I get the sentiment behind this, I’m just really shit at it.
Solve problems together
OK if you are in a safe environment where collaboration is encouraged. Are you? And this is kind of the same as ‘Talk to your colleagues’
Take control of your time
This is really about setting boundaries and not allowing work to dominate your life, instead prioritising other interests and needs outside of work. Really important but hard to do if you have a demanding role, face constantly escalating workloads and have already let the boundaries blur. Or you work for a psychopath.
Perform acts of kindness
Yes, yes, yes. Smile at people, hold the door open for others, behave in the way you’d like to be treated. You’ll get a dopamine hit from the act of kindness, a response in kind from your coworkers (they smile back, they can’t help it). You’re also setting down a marker that says ‘this is who I am, this is how we should behave to each other’. This will make you feel good about yourself and is actually the way to start to make change happen.
Change how you talk about work at home
“I used to talk about the highs and lows of my day with my kids because it makes you go back and think about the things that have gone well, rather than only focusing on the negatives. It’s often harder to remember the good than the bad.”
I mean, yes to the last sentence (as I’ve said above) but can you imagine? No way you are going to be ‘Cool Dad’ doing this. My kids would have destroyed me if I’d tried talking about my day. They’d do that thing where they hold their thumb and forefinger fractionally apart and say “I care this much”. Crushing.
Don’t make your job the centre of your world
Well, I wrote about this two weeks ago. So absolutely yes, but easier said than done when you’re 10 years into your corporate career, with a family and mortgage and a tyrant for a boss.
Work on your exit plan
Yep, said this too. However, not everyone can start here, you just don’t have the energy or motivation. You’ve lapsed into learned helplessness (it’s not your fault, that’s what the system wants) and despondency. You need to build your resources up first, do the work on yourself to give you the wherewithal to plan for the future. This is not the start of the process, it’s one of the steps down the path.
Bits And Pieces
It’s a mixed bag, isn’t it? I can’t decide if I approve or disapprove of articles like this. On the plus side, it is addressing a real issue of people feeling they are stuck in jobs they hate and lack agency to do anything about it. It’s giving some positive suggestions, at least.
However, implicit in the suggestions are assumptions about the state of the individual and the workplace. It’s not really for people who hate their jobs, it’s for people who are bored and fed up with their jobs, who are a bit disenchanted with their lot. Their workplace is benign, where there’s a reasonable amount of trust and psychological safety and where there are opportunities for development and individual agency.
If you are someone who really does hate their job, who is depressed and disconnected and desperate, who is dragging themselves in everyday because they need to money to support their meagre existence, then does this help? Or does it just make you feel more inadequate and disenchanted with life?
If you are someone who works in a low-trust, fear driven environment; with toxic management and micro-managing bosses; doing meaningless work and constantly harassed, how many of these suggestions are useful or feasible? If you can’t do these, if you can’t exercise your agency, is this going to push you towards self-criticism and flagellation?
I hope I haven’t been too negative in my review of the points. My intention is to point out the limitations and practicality of the ideas here. There’s a smidge of toxic positivity here, and also an unhelpful focus on the individual that teeters on victim blaming.
Sometimes things really are totally shit and unrecoverable. Sometimes things get to the state where the only option is to leave, to remove yourself from that situation and recover. Sometimes the things you need to do are beyond you because the situation has harmed and impaired you so much. That’s not negativity, that’s realism.
The danger of article like this is that they encourage people to try and tweak their way to transformation. To avoid addressing the magnitude of the situation they find themselves in, to opt for tactical flourishes instead of the strategic rethink they need. They offer false hope and there’s only so many times you can ‘reset’ yourself in these incremental ways before you run out of hope completely. I know, I’ve been there.
You can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you’re starting from. There’s a reason AA classes start with ‘My name is ……, and I’m an alcoholic’. You have to accept the unvarnished reality of your situation before you can start to make meaningful and lasting change. That requires a clear-eyed, unsentimental view of where you are and how you feel.
And we really don’t like doing that. We run away from reality, we hide in denial, we tell ourselves fairy stories so we can pretend things are not so bad. I know myself that we are brilliant at this, but all it does is delay the day of reckoning. We fear the truth but the only way forward is through the truth.
But that doesn’t really fit in a listicle, much less in the G2 section.
Treasure
As regular readers know, I am a big fan of Be More Pirate and applying the lessons of the Golden Age pirates to bring about change. Frankly, how to use them to ‘love your work a little more’ would have been a much more useful piece. Someone ought to write that. (Er, how about you? Ed.)
Now you can learn how to use them to become a leader of change in your organisations, as the the brilliant Alex Barker, captain of the Be More Pirate community, is running a leadership programme in conjunction with Ioda Education.
It’s properly accredited (being designed around the Level 7 Senior Leader Apprenticeship) and fully funded through the apprenticeship levy, so what are you waiting for? There are only 30 places, so take action now! Full details can be found in this Linked IN post.