8 Ways to Love Your Work

Do you know we spend about one third of our lives at work? That is around a whopping 90,000 hours! Then the question is, do you love doing what you are doing for about one third of your life? Simply said, do you love your work? Work life balance is important, more so with the pandemic likely it has transitioned toward work life integration. But the crux is, how would be a life without the work you do? Do you work only for a living or because you enjoy doing it as well? The fundamental question about whether you love your work is if you truly believe you are doing great work. What value is your work bringing in the lives of others? What is the purpose of your work? Do you find it meaningful? In this post, let’s dive into the 8 ways to love your work. Sounds interesting?

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

– Steve Jobs

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• 9 Ways to Find Fulfillment at Work

Why Love Your Work?

Can you do a work for a significant portion of your day and then your life if you don’t love what you are doing? How many of you drag yourself to work every day, especially on a Monday morning? How many of you love the common American phrase “Thank god it’s Friday”. We show up a work not only to earn a living but to do something great that we can feel proud of. Something that we can say is our achievement.

Besides, we live only one life and that too a short one. Then should we not use our valuable time doing a work that we feel good about doing? That which can give us true fulfillment? So it might not be wrong to say one who loves his or her work has already achieved success at work and in life. Because our identity often becomes our work if we truly love it and feel passionate about.

8 Ways to Love Your Work

Do you find it difficult to love the work you do? If so, you might not be the only one. Because a study conducted by Gallup shows only 15% of the world’s one billion full time workforce is engaged at work, that means a vast majority of 85% people hate their jobs, especially their bosses. Jim Clifton, CEO of Gallup, published this article “The World’s Broken Workplace” on June 13, 2017, wherein he shares how worldwide workplace productivity is declining because people hate their jobs and what workplace transformations we need to shift the tide. Do you hate your job? If so, let’s explore the 9 ways to love your work and how you can make a change towards it.

Find the Right Boss

First, following up on the article by Gallop, a staggering 70% of Americans and 94% Japanese are not engaged at work primarily because they hate their bosses and the age old management practices of controlling workforce rather than high-development coaching. Today’s workforce doesn’t want controlling by their managers. Instead, what they want is leaders who can coach them and help them achieve their fullest potential by building on their strengths and not harping on their weaknesses. Does it sound familiar? How is your boss you work for?

Identify the Purpose of Your Work

Second, on the journey toward loving our work, we need to identify the purpose of our work. That means how is our work solving a problem for the customers we serve or the vast majority of the people in the world? For example, if one works in the construction of a road might be worthwhile to think about what value the road one is constructing will provide to the people of the region. So how it will reduce the commute time of the traffickers. Then how that improves the quality of life of these people. If we can find meaning in our work, that can help a lot in loving what we do.

Know and Leverage Your Strengths

Third, after we understand the purpose and meaningfulness of the work we do, we need it to know our strengths. Besides, we should play our strengths at work and not get bogged down on developing on our weaknesses. This is because highly likely our weaknesses will never become our strengths. Since it might not make sense, we spend our lifetime trying to convert our weakness to our strengths, spending all our time and energy.

Find Your Value Add

Fourth, it is imperative for us to understand what value are we adding our company and therefore our customers we serve. Hence, it might be worthwhile to put ourselves in our leadership’s shoes and ask what if we do we’ll be most valuable to our company’s needs? That is what problem if we can help solve it will be most helpful for the business we serve.

If we can decipher ourselves what might be the best value, we can provide our companies or customers based on our strengths, then the next step becomes easy working with our leadership toward materializing it.

So far, we have covered 4 of the 8 ways to love your work. Let’s discuss the remaining 4 ways.

Collaborate with Great People

Fifth, is the opportunity to work with great people that makes us get excited about going for work. Did you even realize this? Work place is not only a place and to get work done, but a vast majority of getting a great work done depends on how we collaborate with each other to make this happen. Say, we are working on a complex problem that needs cross-functional teams to work together to come up with an ingenuous solution, then how can we accomplish that without realizing the fullest potential of all the team members?

Then it is this opportunity to collaborate with brilliant people with like-minded and common organizational values that is a vital way to love our work. Many times we chose any organization over another or spend our lifetime working for it just because we love the people work with.

Build Relationships at Work

Sixth, it might sound clique, but great places are those which provide the opportunity to build long-lasting relationships with our work colleagues. We human beings are not machines or robots, so we need a social system at work too. Money, job title, fame or passion for the work could be reasons we end up in the job. But many times that is not enough to feel the drive the go to work every day. Sometimes it is also because of the bonding we create at the workplace with our co-workers. And our desire to help other succeed could be a major driver.

Make Sure Your Values Aligns with Workplace Values

Seventh, is about how our own values align with the values of our workplace. Values are core to who we are and that which defines our character. Similarly, the values of any company also define its character. Then how can we love our work if our values and our company’s values don’t align? This also has to do a lot about the culture of the workplace. Which, many times, is beyond our control. But once we find the right company that resonates with our own values, we might consider several times before quitting it.

Make Sure You are Learning and Developing

Eighth, and last make sure you are learning and developing at your workplace. If work is only trading hours for money, then it would be difficult to love our work. For sure, we will love it if it pays our bills, which is also what we need but it is a fulfilling work? Would we feel excited getting up everyday morning to go to work if we are not learning and developing ourselves as professionals? That is the reason it is imperative we have leaders in the companies we for, who can coach us to develop us by leveraging our strengths. Not focus on our weaknesses.

What we don’t want are managers who only check the boxes for supervisory control. We need managers or supervisors to become coaches, helping you succeed based on your strengths. Developing you for the next role you want to do. Does this sound this sound familiar?

Conclusion

To conclude, let’s get back to the study by Gallup. 85% of the one billion workforce in the world are not engaged. They hate their jobs. Are you one of them? If so, what can you do to love your work?

With these 8 ways to love your work, you can first understand where you are and how you can carve a path forward to love your work and not brooding about going to work. Does these 8 ways to love your work make sense or resonate with you? What additional comments or thoughts do you have? Please share in the comments.