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How to Rejuvenate Your Job

Think about your job. Do you love it? Or hate it? If you are like most people, you have mixed feelings There are parts of it you like and parts you dislike and even parts you hate. Let's take a worst-case scenario where you positive detest your job.

Why are you still there? There is something holding you to it. Possibly it is the salary you have become dependent on. Or the status your title conveys. Or the hope that tomorrow will be better. Or something else altogether, or some combination of all these.

It does not matter. Write down a list of what keeps you in your job and contemplate it. This is the positive side of the trade-off you are making. Think of what it means to you and for those close to you and for others. Be grateful for the salary you get. This is what you use to pay your mortgage, run your house, feed your kids, and pay for vacations and medical expenses. Think consciously about the fact that there are many, many people who would trade places with you in a heartbeat.

Be grateful for this. Take ten minutes or more and really, truly be thankful.

Next, think of what you do. Not everything you do during the day is distasteful. There are some tiny bits that are actually fun and rejuvenating. It may be calling on a particular customer. Or working with a colleague in another department. Or the Monday-night company bowling league. Think carefully and put down everything that leaves you reenergized. You will be surprised by how long this list becomes. Do this task over two or three days. Just keep the list with you and jot down everything you can think of, including that the Coke in the vending machine is really cold and the bathrooms are always clean.

Contemplate this list and be grateful for each item. Particularly feel grateful for each job-related piece. For the tough project from which you learned a lot. For the incessant travel that is making family life difficult but lets you work out regularly at hotel gyms. For the officer^'s post at the trade association that takes a lot of time but also gets you known in the industry.

Feel the appreciation emanate out and envelop you.

Recognize that the frustration you feel is because you have spent and are spending all your energy focusing on what you don^'t have. On the things that trouble you in your workplace. On stuff that you would change by force if you could. This is a hallmark of a me-centered universe.

Focus instead on what is right with your place of work. You can^'t do it all the time, but do it as much as you can. Really do it. Put your heart in it.

Do you think of yourself as a meaningless cog in a giant gear wheel? Don^'t. The enterprise in which you work is convey­ing real benefits to someone, somewhere. There are households that are functioning because of the salaries it provides, there are communities that offer services because of the taxes it pays, there are customers whose lives are better because of the products it puts out.

Think of the vast web of connections - with customers, vendors, communities, the public, the government— that you are a small part of.  Does your company make the cables that go into the braking systems of airplanes? Then you have a small role in helping millions of passengers travel safely for vacations and for business. Be grateful for this.

 A magnificent cathedral was going up. Already it dwarfed structures in the entire country and it had not reached half its intended elevation or a quarter of the land it would cover. The incomparable frescos, the marvelous stained-glass windows, the ornate carvings—these were all still notions in the minds of the architect and the cabal of master crafts-men he had assembled.

As the architect walked along the dusty road to inspect his creation unfolding, he passed three men toiling in the hot noonday sun. Each was a young man in the prime of life. Each was performing the same task. A painful, laborious task. Each would take a piece of rock, put it on a large flat stone, and hit it with a sledgehammer till it broke. To each he posed the same question, ^"What are you doing, my good man, and why are you doing it?"

The first man answered: ^"Can^'t you see what I am doing? I am breaking rocks and I do it because I get ha^'pennoth a day."

The second man answered: "I am making the small stones that will go into the wall of yonder building. I do it so I can feed my fam­ily."

The third man answered: "I am helping construct this wondrous cathedral you see before you. When it is finished, people will come here from many countries to gaze upon its marvels. I do it so I can learn how, for, truth to tell, I can earn a better wage with less effort as an ap­prentice."

On an impulse the architect summoned his assistant and asked him to keep track of each of the men over the years.

Four decades later, the first man had died. He had remained a day laborer working at even more menial tasks when his strength eroded. The second man had retired and was living in modest comfort. He had, in time, become a craftsman and achieved a reputation as a depend-able, if unimaginative, worker.

The third man? The architect had no need to ask about him. His fame was still spreading, and the wondrous edifices he had conceived of dotted the land.

DON^'T break rocks that go into a wall. Be part of a team that builds a cathedral. Even the water bearer in a caravan contributes to its success. It's all in your head.

When you have done all this, it is time for the next step. Identify one area in your work where you would like to improve your skills and become more efficient. This should involve some learn­ing on your part. Pick something where your success will result in increasing the part of your work you most enjoy.

Are you a financial planner who really hates cold calling but who loves writing? Learn about direct mail and how to create com­pelling headlines and copy so you can spend more time with clients and less time trying to get appointments. Are you a boss who dislikes telling subordinates that they are not pulling their weight but likes supporting your staff? Take a course on Socratic questioning and providing effective feedback. Do you wish you could stick up for yourself more when aggressive coworkers invade your turf and ^"assign" you tasks you would rather not do? Go to a seminar on assertiveness training or nonviolent communication. Do you like dealing with clients who really respect your knowledge and the care with which you provide services to them? Analyze your favorite clients, develop a profile, and come up with a strategy for getting more of them.

For one month focus exclusively on acquiring the skill you have identified and applying it appropriately. The learning is important. You have to learn something that gets you out of familiar territory and increases your knowledge base and your skill set. You will select the learning and the measure used for evaluation_.

If you are the financial planner learning about direct mail, for example, you may set a goal of learning what makes a headline effective and how to compose a powerful one as your learning objective. Coming up with at least ten headlines for the service you provide might be your performance goal.

Evaluate your progress at the end of the month. If you have not met your goals, it may be because you need more time, or more resources, or because your target was inappropriate. Set an-other target skill and performance goal for the second month. It's okay to extend the previous month's targets if you need more time and you have made progress. It's not okay to do this simply be-cause you did not make an honest effort and therefore did not accomplish anything.

You will often find that you are stuck and need to reach out to others who have the knowledge and skills you lack. By all means, extend yourself. The next exercise gives you powerful methods to elicit such help. Be persistent.

Keep doing this for a year. At the end of this time, you will have learned at least a half dozen new skills and improved your performance on many functions. But more important, you will have rejuvenated your job. Not only that, I will wager you dinner that you will also find that your job performance has improved greatly and that you are actually enjoying it much of the time.

Your increased satisfaction comes about for two reasons. You have acted in your self-interest but you have also expanded your understanding of self-interest. What you are really doing is using the Law of Increase and the knowledge of the Universe as a force multiplier to your advantage. When you stop explicitly focusing on yourself, on what you want and what you don't have, and start fo­cusing on how you can be of service to a larger community, then you set loose some very powerful forces. Your broadcast goes out, gets amplified, and comes right back to you. In fact, this is the most efficient method of truly getting the happiness that you crave.

When you first try this, you may feel that you are playacting. You don't really feel sincere about being of service to others. That^'s okay. You cannot overcome the "me-first^" conditioning of decades immediately. Keep playacting. Sooner or later, like the amate^ur actor mentioned earlier, you will begin to sink into your role.

And that is when your life begins to take off?

Try it.

HELPFUL HINTS

1.   Remember that focus is the key. Your job makes you miserable if you focus on the myriad things that are "wrong" with it. You can start making it totally rejuvenating when you begin by focusing on what is "right" with it. Ignore all the stuff—even if it is the vast majority—that you feel is "wrong:'

2.   You will have many people tell you that when you ignore the "horrible" things at work, you are actually helping them continue and perpetuating the status quo. They might even accuse you of actually "helping" the organization get away with all sorts of bad behavior. Ignore all of this. You are doing this for you, not for the company you work for. You always work in your perceived best self-interest. Make this work for you!

 Now that you understand that everyone works in their own ^self-interest, you can have a very different perspective on profes­sional relationships. You don't worry about what others will think