On getting that Job: Falling in love with your job
A guide to be happy with your current job while you look for the next one.
Happy New Year, Hypers!
After some weeks off, Under the Hype is here again. I spent a lot of time with my family and friends in my home country and now I’m ready to keep writing every week.
Probably one of your goals this year is to get a new job with a higher wage, better work conditions, and more interesting tasks. That’s great! But be careful, when we are in this situation, we tend to see our current jobs as a waste of time, a bad place to be, and the cause of our unhappiness.
Maybe some of you think this is totally ok. This feeling pushes us to do our best to get a better job. However, these feelings put us in quite a dark place. It causes depression, anxiety, and unhappiness in general. Being happy and motivated is a way better approach.
That’s why today I want to tell you how to be happy with your current job. This way, you’ll begin each day with much more motivation and desire to do what you need to do.
Let’s get started!
The Root Cause
Why do you want to switch jobs? Do you want more money? Do you need to work from home? Are you interested in another professional sector?
The first thing to do is to figure out the cause of the change. This will make you realize what is not so good with your current job but also what is totally okay with it. All jobs have good and bad things. No matter how much you hate your current job, it will have positive things.
For example, maybe you want to earn more money. Okay, that’s definitively a pain point. But what about your teammates? Are they good people? Do they support you? Is your boss a nice person? What about the work conditions? The gear, the vacations, the working hours, the working place…
With these questions, you’ll separate deal breakers from good things. This is the first step to improving your relationship with your current job.
Focus on the Good Things
Now you know what is bad and good about your current job. When we are looking for a new position, we tend to focus on the bad things. But guess what, this is wrong!
Bad things are there, and you are trying to change them. You think that getting a new job is the solution and that’s ok. There’s no point in highlighting bad things about your current job all the time. It will just make you unhappy, nothing else.
Focusing on the good things about your job, on the other hand, has a great benefit. It will make you happier and the switching process will be way easier for your mental health.
Your current wage could be far from ideal. But maybe you have access to learning resources or can work from home. Focus on those good things.
Take Full Responsibility
It is common to blame our current job for most of the things going wrong in our lives. “If I quit this job, I’d get rid of this and that, I wouldn’t have to deal with this person anymore. In a few words, I’d be happy“. Like if our only problem was our current job.
This idea is false most of the time. And even when this idea is not far from reality, it is quite discouraging to think that fixing our current situation is something that’s not in our hands to solve. Switching jobs is a process that can take time, and most of the time we can’t just quit our current job just like that. Then, we’ll feel trapped and powerless during the switching process. This is the real cause of our frustration.
A much better approach is to take full responsibility. Taking responsibility is often seen as blaming ourselves or declaring ourselves liable for something. That’s the bad part of taking responsibility. The good part is that we are in control, if something goes wrong, the solution is in our hands.
Is the relationship with our boss far from ideal? Let’s take full responsibility for that. How can we improve that relationship? Or at least, how can we minimize its impact on our lives? I’m sure you will find many possible solutions.
Money
Let’s be honest. Money is almost always the reason for wanting to switch jobs. That’s great! Everybody wants to work in a place that fairly rewards our value. Having a stable source of income that fulfills our necessities is a basic need. This stable and sufficient source of income enables us to focus on our goals while we forget about “make ends meet“ problems.
Sometimes we have a job that pays us a decent salary. A salary that fulfills our current lifestyle. In such cases, please stop for a minute and think how lucky you are. For example, one of my goals is to generate enough sources of passive (or almost passive) income that allow me to quit my job. I’m far from that point right now, I couldn’t live from my current passive income sources. I need an investor. That investor is my current job.
My current job is financing my road to success. They are covering my daily needs, vacations, and occasional whims. Of course, I need to give some time and energy in exchange, but I think it is a good business.
Even when your current job keeps you worried about making ends meet, maybe your situation would be worse without that job. If you are undervalued, then you’ll find a better workplace sooner than later. There’s no point in blaming your current job for your situation.
Conclusions
Finding a new job is a stressful process. We need to face interviews, tests, and other challenges. That’s why it is better to be mentally prepared for those challenges. Being motivated, inspired, focused, and happy will only increase the possibilities to get that new job.
This is even more important for people who are not looking for a new job but who are trying to start a business on their own. The process of being able to create a profitable business that allows us to quit our daily jobs is long and hard. So we’ll need extra motivation, extra inspiration, and extra happiness.
We can’t get those without “falling in love“ with our current job. If we are miserable for 8 hours each day, then we are definitely unhappy. In this post, I tried to give you some different viewpoints to help you ease your relationship with your current job.
The first thing is to clearly define what is the deal breaker with your current job. Why do you want to leave? This will allow us to discover also the good things about our current situation. These good things are key. We need to focus on them. We know there are bad things, and we are already working to solve them (looking for a new job). So, it is better to focus on the good things in the meantime.
Another important step is to take full responsibility for the bad things. I know it’s not exactly your fault. But feeling that you have the power to change things is the first step to actually change things. Then, try to ease those pain points and smooth your switching process.
And finally, realize that your job is financing your goals. It covers your basic needs. Seeing my job as an investor has helped me to feel very happy with it although my life goals and my company’s goals are not exactly aligned.
And that’s it. If one of your goals this year is to find a better workplace, I wish you the best! I hope this article has helped you to face this switching process from a better perspective. Remember that here in Under the Hype I write occasional posts about professional advising, so make sure to subscribe and share this publication with your network. You’d help me a lot.
Wait for more great articles this 2024! See you next Tuesday.