Is it Possible To Be Happy In Your Work?

Victor Encinas & Linda Reyburn

It sounds a bit too good to be true – actually being happy in your work. It’s the Holy Grail of the job world, and certainly the networking world; it’s even possible to get cynical about whether or not it actually does happen (especially after hearing it from people who have bags under their eyes and get their daily antioxidants from Starbucks). Some people seem to revel in their work, the always-present examples of Mother Theresa or Thomas Edison of the 10,000 light bulb experiments….but do these people only come around once per century, or can they really exist in every decade?

Though it is true that even in really good jobs and businesses, there are ‘those days’ – those days when you wish you’d never heard of a particular client who owes money, never met a particular co-worker whose over-ready tongue spreads gossip like an Arizona forest fire – these are the inevitable growing pains of work in the real world. However, it is not necessary to be so ‘adult’ that you forget what a good, satisfactory job looks like. The main enemies in being happy in your work are these:

* Lack of ability to really help clients

* Lack of accomplishment, even in achieving goals

* Being undercut by your fellow workers

* An overwhelming sense of despair about the future (“what’s the use”)

* Under-utilizing your skills and abilities

* Overuse of your weaknesses to meet quotas of work

* Multitasking Madness: being pulled in twenty directions at once

* Powerlessness – the inability to say no or a real yes

* Lack of leadership in your leaders

* Missing purpose: “this isn’t what I’m meant to do with my life”

Sometimes, it’s just not enough to tell yourself that you’re feeding the family and providing for their futures as best you can, and that more and harder work is the answer. Anyone who has travelled to (or seen a good documentary of) third-world countries knows that there are people who work fifteen-hour days and just don’t get ahead in life – they barely survive. It’s possible to do the same with modern amenities like a car and a laptop and cell phone; the more you have, the more you seem to need, especially if there’s no satisfaction about your work at the end of the day. You drag home, thinking that you’re only making money to watch it leak out like a sieve at the end of the day. (This is a roughly paraphrased version of the verse in Haggai 1:6 – “You have sown much, and bring in little; you eat, but do not have enough; you drink, but you are not filled with drink; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and he who earns wages, earns wages to put into a bag with holes.”)

The world tells us that it can give us significance. If only this goal is accomplished, or that person is in a relationship with you, you will have significance – you will have that satisfaction that you long for. And it’s always described as a one-shot deal. Once you attain that goal, you will never want for anything more in life than the perfect house that captured your heart as soon as the real

estate agent showed it to you. You can see just by watching dissatisfied people in good clothes, with a micro-brewed beer in hand, that they certainly earn the golden pennies that they get – and what pays for those clothes and beer and veal steaks is somehow…. not enough. It’s still necessary for them to escape their toil every night, and try to forget that they have to go back to it tomorrow. And yet one does have to have clothes, a roof over their head, and a way to get to work. Is it possible to have all that, and come home daily with the smile on your face that now only appears on Fridays?

Yes, it is possible. It might take some time and a few books to determine that one of your hobbies really can be turned into a legitimate business. It may take a few years of taking classes, or asking for help from someone who has gone through the process before – that process of finding fulfillment in your work, but not allowing work to become your life or your only accomplishment. But since doing what you’ve been doing has landed you where you are (if you’re already happy in what you’re doing – stop reading, you don’t need this), it would probably be wise to ask a coach for counsel. If you want to accomplish the work-life balance that everyone wants and few get, it’s like trying to accomplish the Olympic medal of fitness – and you’d certainly need a coach for that!

I am not only a certified Dave Ramsey coach, I am also certified to run “48 Days” Seminars (48 Days to the Work You Love, by Dan Miller). Along with the standard tools, such as a personality profile and budget forms, I provide the on-site counseling and questioning that is really necessary to help put feet on those ideas that have been knocking around at the back of your head for ages. Those ideas that have popped up and been smacked down with ‘real-life thinking’ such as “nah, that will never work – but it’d be so much fun if only I could’. It is possible to have some victory in life, and the things that you spend the most time doing – even Solomon said it: “It is good and fitting for one to eat and drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labor in which he toils under the sun all the days of his life which God gives him; for it is his heritage”. (Ecclesiastes 5:18) Labor doesn’t have to be miserable.