Unhappy at work? Go inside-out
The Guardian posted a story on job dissatisfaction that was well written but not all that helpful to readers who want to do something about it. To be fair, “The trials of a 2016 job: why so many of us are unhappy at work” (byline Peter Fleming) focuses on the perceived causes of this malaise, as it clearly states right in the headline.
Photo by Jeff Ballinger (iPhone 5s)
What I want to do here is offer fellow workers of the world some thoughts on how they can help themselves.
The Guardian story lays out the “causes” – low pay, bad management, lack of opportunities for training and development, and a widespread lack of long-term investment by companies – and states that, as a result, many employees are frustrated by a lack of control of their own destinies in the workplace.
The common factor is the perception that management causes these problems and that the average employee can do little, or nothing, about them. This post is not a defense of bad managers, but a complete reframing of what’s actually happening – for the benefit of stressed-out workers everywhere.
Let’s begin by looking at how we see the world, or in this case, our jobs. Most of us look at our jobs from the outside in.
We see our jobs as places where our bosses and our colleagues directly influence how we feel on a daily basis and what we think about our work environment and the people we work with. Essentially, this view says that how we experience our working hours (and sometimes even our non-working hours) comes at us from “the outside”: your job makes you stressed, your spouse frustrates you, your friends disappoint you, etc.
What if I were to tell you that it’s the other way around? That what see as “the outside” is really coming from inside each one of us, from own our minds? It’s a common misunderstanding that, once it’s cleared up, can empower us to experience work, and our lives, in a brand new way – and we don’t have to wait for management to change anything.
Among the fundamental truths I first understood about how the mind works were these:
The mind has a constant flow of thoughts and I need not react to every one
It is up to me how I respond to the behavior of others; I make a choice regardless of whether I am conscious of doing so
This is a universal condition; it’s the same for everyone
This realization was enough to get me started in vastly improving my own experience at work. I began to see that perhaps I was overreacting to the demands of my boss and that by doing so I was feeding the conflict between us. I had been seeing her “picky” requests and “busy work” as a challenge to my expertise in my field and to my job security, and she probably saw my reactions as a challenge to her authority.
With this understanding, I decided to not react to her requests with the first thing that popped into my head. I gave myself time to consider her suggestions and her behavior first before responding. I soon found out that with this approach, my influence actually increased.
This type of calm communication went over much better than telling her why one of her ideas would not work or what had to happen in order for it work better. She began to trust my judgment much more than she had before. I was raising good points and questions in our meetings instead of objecting. She began to see me less as a challenge to her authority and more as a contributing colleague. It didn’t take long for me to also realize that many of my former objections were not really all that important. They were more a matter of my feelings or my ego being bruised.
So it’s not a matter of thinking better thoughts. The flow of thoughts is constant, and if you get stuck on one – particularly like “my job is useless” or “my boss is an idiot” – you can waste lots of time going around and around with it in your head.
Just recognize that when you do get stuck, that it’s just a thought you’re having, that’s all. Typically, this realization alone enables me to let go of that sticky one and gets my thoughts flowing again.
It’s a matter of noticing that our experience is coming from within ourselves and not from “out there.” Then we can see a thought and decide for ourselves, “Is that thought really true? Do I have to listen to that?”