If You Can’t Be With the Job You Love, Love the Job You’re With

by Judy Klipin

A recent Huffington Post story that is doing the rounds talks about the negative effect working in a job you hate has on your health. All of the effects that are listed are also symptoms of burnout.

As I frequently maintain, we get burnout from doing too much or too many of the wrong things – the things that are wrong for us – and working at a job we hate or in an environment that feels toxic to us is certainly a very wrong thing.

In an ideal world, we would all be doing work we love with people we get along with and in places that spark joy. However, we are very far away from ideal and are not likely to reach it any time soon. Many people do not have the luxury of finding jobs that make them jump with jubilation.

With the economy being what it is, the relief is in having a job at all. Even if that job is far removed from what we dreamed about when preparing for employment. Even if we have to work for a horrible boss, or with toxic people, or in a place that sparks the opposite of joy.

Unfortunately, the benefits of being gainfully employed are sometimes outweighed by the challenges of unfulfilling work.

So, what do we do when we hate our work but have to stay with and in it to survive? We turn to the wisdom of the poets and, to paraphrase Christopher Stills, we learn to love the job we’re with.

We may not be able to love everything about our work, but, with some effort and attention, we can find some aspects of it to love – or at least to feel warmly towards.

Find meaning.

Grow.

Use this time to develop your knowledge and skills. Sign up for a distance learning course or degree, put yourself forward for a staff development programme, ask a colleague to teach you to speak to them in their home language.

Build a community.

Find someone or someones who you can connect with every day; have tea or lunch with, or even just greet and make eye contact with.

En-joy your space.

Put a pot-plant or fresh flowers on your desk, bring in a mug that makes you happy to drink your tea from, stick a vision board on your wall.

Get moving.

Instead of surfing social media sites during your breaks, go for a walk outside in the fresh air. Or, you could use your breaks to…

Get creative.

Many authors wrote their first novel during their work lunch-hours (and maybe sometimes also when they were supposed to be doing other things, which I am not advocating at all). If you’ve got a story to tell, use your paid down-time to start telling it.

As the Rolling Stones told us,

You can’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.

You can make (at least some aspects of) your work work for you.

Feeling overwhelmed in your life, work or relationships?

Purchase one of my self-study online courses.

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