Finding Joy and Calling in Your Work
Is it actually possible to find joy in our work? I think it is. Some of us have to work harder to arrive at having work that brings us joy, and we can go through seasons in our lives when we enjoy our work more than other times.
Arthur C. Brooks spoke recently at the HBR Leadership Conference. He made some very salient points about work, career, and life.
Most people are not taught to look for their calling, they are taught to chase money.
Don’t lean into doing more and running faster, lean into breaks, like a few weeks or a month at a time, when you slow down your mind and leave space to think about what really matters to you and what you want to do with your future
People who are less happy after leaving their careers are moving away from something. People who are happier after leaving their careers are moving toward something.
Three things you can feel if you are thinking about a career change or new job and if they are balanced are excitement, fear, and deadness. If when you think about making a change you feel 80% excitement, 20% fear and 0% deadness, it is worth making the change. If the deadness in your job is increasing continuously week to week, month to month look for change over time. If the deadness is increasing it’s time to look for a change over the next 12 – 24 months.
Brooks believes in work life integration, not balance. Life (leisure) and work need to feed each other and make each other better.
After hearing Brooks this spring at the HBR Conference I heard Jim Collins speak at the Global Leadership Conference this August and he had meaningful perspectives to share about finding work that fits who we are. He shared the idea of “encodings”, durable capacities of a person’s intrinsic construction that lie within waiting discovery from the experiences of life.
To find meaningful work you may need to flip the arrow of money: to see money as a way to do what you are encoded for instead of work as a means to money. Understanding most of us need to make a living, and yet, if we can find a way to do work that fits who we really are and is something someone else is willing to pay for, we are much closer to living a fulfilling, meaningful life.
There are multiple possibilities within each person. Some people find their encoding early and stay with it the rest of their lives. Some make radical shifts to a 2 nd or 3 rd frame during their lives. A person can have multiple frames that are very different from each other over a lifetime.
How can I determine what my encoding is? I have worked for many years with clients and individuals attempting to find a match between what makes a person’s heart sing and specific tasks and behaviors required in specific work. The Harrison Assessment is the tool I use to uncover these mysteries and it is extremely affective in highlighting what people love to do and what they would rather leave to someone else. This is not about what we are good at, but what we truly enjoy. However, there is a link to being great at what we do because if we do work that fits who we are, it is much more likely we will be great at our work.
#joyatwork #integratedlife #timetomakechange