recrafting your work
hate your job? then get another one.
For plenty of people that I know, changing your life and the way you feel about your work means getting a new job. There are many ways of changing your job and not all of them involve quitting. Quitting is dramatic but that’s the only action that you are taking control of. You are still relying on the world around you to improve and make you happier.
Don’t have a cool job? Csikszentmihalyi makes a big deal about the happiest man he’s met being a welder. So choose what you want – a job everyone else thinks is cool or one that makes you happy.
Signature strengths aren’t ‘programming’ or ‘horse-riding’ or ‘surgery’. Strengths like ‘zest’ and ‘social intelligence’ can be used in an awful lot of jobs. The key to ‘recrafting’ is that it is a bit about doing the same job differently and a lot about looking at the same job differently. It may ultimately mean quitting but it is about having a goal for your career that has very little to do with traditional career paths and promotion ladders.
When did you last have fun at work? Problem with this question is the answers can be a bit trite and not really work-related (gossiping at the water cooler, when the boss was off).
Much more interesting is when did you last experience flow at work? What were you doing? For me, this week, it was an utterly absorbing conversation. It was supposed to be half-an-hour catch-up in a local coffee shop. By the time we paused we had sat through an entire lunch rush and not noticed. The conversation was two and half hours. Classic flow.
I was talking to a colleague who I think is a very smart guy, but I don’t always agree with straight off. We were talking about the future of our teams. We’ve been through some bad times and we were cheerfully wondering if we’re doomed or if there was stuff we could do about it.
According to the authentic happiness questionnaire, my top signature strengths are
- love of learning,
- hope, optimism, and future-mindedness
- judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
- curiosity and interest in the world
So you could say the conversation was quite so engaging because I was thinking optimistically about the future, showing curiousity, learning a different perspective, and subjecting it to critical thinking.
When I think about I can remember quite a few other great conversations that share these properties. There’s plenty of ways I can productively do more of that in my day to day work. There are lots of people I ought to talk to more and plenty of them that have challenging perspectives.
It isn’t all about changing the tasks. You can always recraft what happens in your head. The things you focus on. The story you tell yourself about your work and why you do it.
Occasionally your work is fundamentally at odds with your signature strengths. You might have a problem if honesty is your big signature strength and you are working as a salesman for a product you don’t believe in. Sometimes you have to quit 🙂