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Welcome to Wendy Churchill's Life is a Bag of Revels

Published on 24 Jun, 2009

How your job affects your happiness

The work that we do (or don’t do) has an enormous effect on how we feel about our life and about ourselves - on both a day to day basis and as the bigger picture

Taking stock of the effects that your work has on you is the first stop in ensuring it’s offering you more satisfaction than agro

I’m going to start this week by putting my counsellor hat on and asking you to answer a couple of (quite personal) questions about work.

1. How much do you think your work or role in life (or perhaps the question of your work or role in life) affects your feelings of happiness, satisfaction, self worth and meaning in life?

2. And how about on a day to day to basis? To what extent can what is happening at work affect what is happening in your mind or mood? How much of how you’re feeling on certain weeks has been created by events at work?

(Give the questions a few moments to sink in and your self some time to allow different answers to slowly surface.)

Such a powerful force over our emotions

Whether we are women looking after the home and or children, currently unemployed, a nurse, an office worker, a postman, a plumber or a politician, there is no doubt that the work we do (or don’t) has enormous impact on the way we feel about ourselves and about our lives.

From week to week our job can make us feel a whole host of emotions including pride in our achievements, pain at our failings, joy and excitement, frustration and anger, fun and friendship, fear and hatred… and so on and so.

Work, of course, as with almost everything, always comes with downsides. If you’ve ever worked in an office then you’ll understand what poet Charles Lamb described nearly two hundred years ago as “that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood”. The pain of repetition, routine and boredom.

Or as Jonathan Gathore-Hardy wrote in 1970 in The Office, “My hatred was an almost physical reaction to the sensation of being shut up, every day, all week, in a box; to the cumulative effect of trivial work, of being exposed for the first time to the humiliations, ambitions and restrictions of office life; and to seeing no possible escape from all this for the rest of my life.”

Work does bring us joys and triumphs

No matter how much we like to moan about our work, however, it does have its positives. (If nothing more than to stand as a contrast to our weekends!)

If we are lucky enough to have a job that we enjoy then it can bring us great feelings of achievement, of contributing to the world, of self worth and of satisfaction. It is also a source of friendship, of communal life, of identity, and a feeling of having your own snug alloted slot in the great ‘working world’.

In fact, I quite like what Alain de Botton had to say on the subject in an article in Psychologies magazine recently:

“The start of work on a Monday morning may mean the end to freedom, but it also means entering a more focused, rational and intense realm. Our thousands of possibilities are reduced to an agreeable handful. You are once again who it says you are on your business card. The start of the day in the office burns off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy. It is a practical stage for clear-eyed action. It’s time to make some coffee and stop asking the large questions.”

Why getting satisfaction from our work these days is so much harder

Another very interesting point that Alain de Botton talks about in the article is how unhappiness at work can be more complicated these days. While in the past work was seen by most as a chore and a drudge that we just had to get through, we now actually expect to get something back from it and for it to fill our lives with worth and meaning. Which makes work a lot more difficult to bear if you find that you don’t actually enjoy it - or that it is nothing but drudgery.

I was a little disappointed, however, by Alain’s claim that jobs that pay highly tend to be low on meaning and vice versa. “The big profits,” he says, “are made trading commodities, mass manufacturing soap suds or setting up call centres - whereas occupations that transform others’ lives, such as nursing, poetry writing or landscape gardening, remain at pre-industrial levels of profitability.”

But we ALL have the opportunity to make a BIG DIFFERENCE

First of all, I think the majority of people enjoy neither high salaries or a job that they feel really transforms other peoples’ lives. Secondly, so few people read poetry or can afford landscape gardening that it seems wrong to say that these people’s jobs are meaningful while most people’s are not.

I would prefer to replace these rather sentimental or simplistic understandings of meaningful employment with the idea that we all have an opportunity to add meaning to the world and transform the lives of others in our work.

Surely the person who sets up a call centre - and indeed the people who work in those centres - have as much of a chance to affect the lives of many many people as do the courageous nurses who work in our hospitals. And haven’t we all come in contact with people who add as much poetry and entertainment to our daily lives as professional poets?

We each of us have an enormous responsibility when we go about our work each day: to have a positive affect on the people we work with and who are affected by our work, to give to our work the best of our abilities, and to face the daily demands with hope, with courage and with dignity.

Dealing with the blows, the disappointments and the pressures

Because yes, work can be very demanding, very frustrating and almost soul-destroying at times.

Many of us, for example, are inclined to spend more time dwelling on our small or daily failures than on reminding ourselves of our successes or positive contributions. It is very hard for a parent, for example, to praise themselves for what they do right when there always seem to be so many things that we can get wrong.

The nature of office or corporate culture can also often demand that we are enormously robust and tough-skinned to survive the competition, the back-stabbing and the politics. Not to mention the inevitable criticisms.

So how can we possibly get through the working week and feel that we have done well rather than nurse our wounds and fester our failures? Here are a few little tips for you:

* Recognise the extent to which your mood from week to week can easily be affected by small events, throw-away comments, or by your temporary successes or failures. Even an off-hand comment by a colleague or the slightest criticism of our work can put a dampener on how good we feel about ourselves for weeks. Reminding yourself that this feeling will pass and new ones come will help it fade faster.

* When you find yourself feeling bad because of something that has happened or you have done at work, listen in to what you are saying to yourself in the back of your head. (You know that little voice that’s almost too quiet to hear which is amazing given the enormous amount of anger , bile or frustration it can be expressing?) Does this small weakness at work, for example, really warrant you telling yourself that you are useless and will be thrown out of work shortly?

* When things are not going well or you’re feeling bad, try and look for an opportunity for improvement within the negativity. If you are criticized by your boss, for example, you can see it as a way of learning more about what it is he or she wants from you and adapting accordingly. Most mistakes that we make are an opportunity for improving our skills and abilities.

* Remember, of course, that NOBODY is brilliant all of the time. One of the things that enable people to rise to the tops of companies, in fact, is their ability to throw themselves in and try their very best, accepting that a lot of what they do will be wrong and that they will therefore face the (silent) criticisms of others.

* Watch out for the Seven Year Itch. Many people, apparently, are happiest in the first few years of their stay at a company. Less people say they are happy if they have been in the same job for more than 10 years.

* According to the Happiness at Work Index, 73% of people say that relationships with colleagues are a key factor in happiness at work. This has got to be, therefore, a key area to work on. What can you do to improve the work environment at your place of work?

* Mid-life crisis? As the psychologist Carl Jung said, mid-life is a time to listen deeply to your heart. Whether we plan for this or not, midlife can be a period of appraisal, reappraisal and change so it can be important to allow time for reflection on ourselves and what we are doing in life. Change is never easy but it is sometimes crucial.

* Start the day calmly and feeling that you are in control and you will have more chance of feeling that way all day. Your morning routine and state of mind can set the tone for your working life.

* Write a list of 3 feelings, annoyances or problems that you are experiencing about work at the moment. Next, think creatively about things you could do to alleviate these discomforts. Even something as simple as a few pictures of nature can alleviate the feeling of being trapped in a sterile environment. Reducing your expectations for how much you can get done in a day could reduce that feeling of constant time pressure…

For many of us, the work you do is a large part of what or who you are. It is a chance to give of ourselves and get back just rewards. Life’s too short not to ensure you’re making the most of it!

Two themes coming up in the next few weeks: Living Your Dream and Facing the Fear or Reality of Redundancy. 

Other recent issues

Posted on 17 Jun, 2009 -

Twitter, The Holocaust and the Dignity of Men

Posted on 03 Jun, 2009 -

Stop Worrying, Start Living

'Thought for the Day'

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Bag of Revels is Published by Oxfordshire Press Ltd © 2009