Love your work. Do I have to?
How can we stay in love with our work? And do we have to?
In the end, we work to live. As long as we can earn a living, and provide for ourselves and those we love, work is doing its job for us. Or is it?
A recent Gallup report highlighted that, on average, each of us spends a whopping 81,396 hours working. The only thing we’ll do more of (hopefully!) is sleep.
We don’t have to love each of those 81,396 hours spent working, but we need to have a sense that spending all this time matters. If it doesn’t, we lose energy, drive and sometimes hope.
Like in a loving relationship we don’t expect perfection. We accept flaws, forgive mistakes, and might even find some quirks endearing. If we look for the perfect job or career, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.
Let’s look for meaningful work instead.
When we find meaning in our work, we stay inspired and energised, even through the tough times.
Meaningful work sustains us when nothing seems to work, when our efforts to generate new business aren’t converting, when we face a technical setback, have been overlooked for that promotion or face team dynamics that fill our Sunday evening with a sense of dread.
Meaningful work is work where we can use our skills, learn new things and shine.
Meaningful work gives us the impetus to change things and make progress on important work, even when it’s hard.
When work is meaningful, our relationships at work tend to be more meaningful too. The people we work with matter and we care about each other.
Meaningful work fills us up instead of draining our energy and spirit.
To find meaning in our work and fall in love with it we need to understand our personal sources of meaning.
The Map of Meaning® is a research-based, pragmatic, intuitive yet profound framework that allows us to explore what matters. It has identified drivers for meaning that are universal to all human beings. These drivers live in the tension of making an active contribution and needing to rest and in the tension of caring about others as well as caring about our own needs and desires.
Once we know the deeper answers to what we find meaningful we can get much better at job crafting, or deciding what our next (or first) career move should be.
This deep self-knowledge lets us make deliberate choices, defend our point of view and communicate clearly what propels us forward and what holds us back.
The Map makes visible when we might be ground down by challenging circumstances, endless re-organisations, or conflicting values. It becomes a tool to evaluate whether we can stay or should go.
Because perfect work exists as much as a perfect relationship.
But we need a way of knowing whether something is worth fighting for.