It happens to everyone. You begin your career with enthusiasm and slowly overtime work begins to feel like a chore. There’s not enough coffee or sleep to get you inspired to get out of bed in the morning and go to work. Sound familiar? According to the latest Gallup Poll, only 34% of people are engaged in their jobs, which means that the majority of people are disengaged. Are you one of them?
Disengagement is an obvious problem for the employer as they see reduced productivity and profitability, but what about the problem it causes for you? When you feel disengaged it impacts your happiness. You become more annoyed, irritable, and frustrated which increases your stress levels. Disengagement is impacting your health! You will spend 1/3 of your life at work over your lifetime. Do you want to spend it unhappy and unhealthy or feeling your personal best? This is every leader’s choice. To improve engagement, one of the places we recommend starting at is understanding your passion. Passion is what connects you to your job and it has profound impacts on your job satisfaction. Here are four ways you can find passion in your job.
1. Passion about what you do.
Maybe you are a retail buyer and love choosing the items for next season’s floor or perhaps you are a skydiving instructor. Assess your job and identify if you find passion in what you do? If not, no worries. That does not mean that you cannot find passion. This is one of the misconceptions about passion, that it can only be found in what you do and it’s not true!
2. Passion about how you do it.
Maybe your job is working on a large customer service team. Everyone has the same job, to serve the customer but you go the extra mile. You excitedly greet your customers with each phone call and even go the extra mile by sending personal birthday notes to them each year. That is a great source of passion as you can look at your job and find ways to make it your own. Ask yourself, do you add a personal touch to your role or are you doing the status-quo? If this source of passion does not resonate with you, try the next source of passion.
3. Passion about why you do it.
Perhaps you want to be a lobbyist for the environment to save the planet or maybe be a teacher to impact the lives of future leaders. This is a great source of passion but some jobs may not lend themselves as strongly to this particular source. To find passion in why you do something, ask yourself, “why is what I’m doing important?” If you find that there is an underlying purpose that is inspired as a result of answering the question, that is your “why” to get out of bed in the morning.
4. Passion about who you do it for.
Who are the people that you want to help? What difference will you make in their life? Why do you want to help them? Maybe you are in financial services and want to help people save for retirement or maybe you are a public defender and want to help your clients. Ask yourself a question like, “how do I change the lives of the people I serve?” If you can write down many reasons for why what you do matters to others, this can be a great source of passion.
