16. How to Enjoy Your Work
As you can tell from the name of this podcast, I’m all about introducing you to new concepts and giving you the tools each week to help you truly love your job, even if you end up leaving to pursue something else. The truth is that things at work are likely never going to go 100% according to plan and there are probably things you can think of right now that you don’t enjoy. This is what I’m helping you work through today.
If you’re anything like I used to be, you might be great at finding ways to improve the things in your life or work that you aren’t enjoying. Looking for continuous improvement is an amazing skill to cultivate, but this week, I’m inviting you to try on a different approach.
Tune in today to discover how purposefully noticing things that you do enjoy can be the antidote to not loving your job right now. I’m showing you how this practice will fuel you towards your dream career, and I hope you implement my tips today to make this a habit that will serve you not only in your work but in all aspects of your life.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If you want guidance in walking yourself through my deep dive strategy sessions, subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts! Make sure to follow the instructions here to receive an email from me with the PDF document!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why your brain might be focusing on the negative, even if there are many things going well right now.
How to balance out your brain’s negativity bias.
Why you might deliberately be choosing not to enjoy your job.
The scientific research behind focusing on the positives in your life.
3 benefits of purposefully noticing what is working for you now.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to receive an email from me with my deep-dive strategy session PDF document so you can walk yourself through it!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we are talking about how to enjoy your work, even if some things aren’t going perfectly.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. If you’re ready to take control of your career, create more meaning in your work, and finally, finally experience some lasting career satisfaction, this podcast is for you. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. We are going to talk about enjoying your work this week. And in the spirit of that, I’m going to share something with y’all that I enjoy about my work, and that is when y’all leave me lovely podcast reviews. Thank you so much to each and every one who has rated and reviewed the podcast. I so deeply appreciate it.
And I want to read one of your reviews and celebrate. So in December, I got a review called, “So many a-ha moments,” and the review says, “Recently took a risk and made a major career move and the podcast is not only helping me set up for success in this new path and work environment, but also offering plenty of a-ha moments that apply to other areas of my life I want to level up now that work is no longer the problem.”
Thank you so much for that review and you are welcome. I’m so delighted that the podcast is useful and I’m especially delighted that it’s useful not only for work but also for other areas. I get this feedback a lot and I always feel really happy about it because while the podcast is focused on work, I do think all of the teachings can be used in so many different ways.
I’ve specifically recently heard from someone who does creative work that it’s really helpful for her creative work as well. And so take these lessons and apply them to all the areas of your life. You can get a lot of value even beyond just the workplace.
And there’s also something else I wanted to mention about that review. In that review, the person is talking about having left their job and I think that’s so awesome. I love it when people leave their job to go pursue something else. And I wanted to say that clearly because this podcast is called Love Your Job Before You Leave It.
So in a lot of ways, yes, I’m encouraging you all to learn how to love the job that you are in, but it’s not because I’m against leaving the job that you’re in. I just think since learning to love a job is a skillset and something we can take with us, why not learn it where we’re at.
And then a lot of my clients actually end up staying in the job that they’re in because once they’ve learned to love it, well, then they love it and they don’t want to leave. But sometimes we learn to love something and we do still want to leave, and even if we haven’t learned to love it, you always get to choose.
If you’re ready to leave a job, you can do that whenever you want to. You have total free will. When I worked in corporate and I went through coaching as a client myself, I did learn so much that was helping me show up differently at work and have a better experience at work, and I still wanted to leave that job and start my coaching business.
And I didn’t 100% learn to love that job before I left it. I was willing to bring some of that work with me and then I’ve had to do that work in my business. So it’s not that one or the other is better. I just think if we already have a great job, like I did, sometimes it’s great to just go ahead and learn how to love it, and then we can go to the next thing fully loving it. But it’s not a hard and fast rule. So you always get to choose what you want to do, and the way you want to apply the things I teach in the podcast.
Alright, without further ado though, let’s get into a discussion of how you can enjoy your job more, even when things aren’t going 100% according to your plan, even if you’re planning on leaving this job, even if you want to do something else. Whatever the thing is for you, let’s talk about how to enjoy your job anyway.
If you’re anything like I used to be, you might be really good at finding ways to improve things. Like when I was in corporate, I was always looking for things that I could improve. Continuous improvement in my role, but also continuously improving my role so that I could enjoy it more.
And listen, this is an amazing skill. I am all about continuous improvement. But there’s also something to be said for enjoying the things that already are working. And we’ve mentioned this briefly on the podcast before but I wanted to take a deeper dive into it because it’s a simple thing to do but it creates life-changing, or rather work-changing results.
So what I’m talking about is noticing and enjoying what’s already working. And I want to be clear that it’s not so that we can just love everything and then never go back to our continuous improvement. But instead, it’s about helping us see that there are things that are working.
The human brain has a bias that orients us towards things that are negative, towards things that are possibly threats. It’s called negativity bias, but sometimes I even think of calling it like, threat bias. Our brain is constantly looking for what’s not working, what could go wrong, what’s dangerous, how could I maybe be hurt or get in trouble.
And our brain will continue to loop and loop and loop on that, and that looping can really push us towards wanting to do the continuous improvement. Our brain’s always bringing up potential threats and then we’re always addressing them.
But the thing is this is a bias. So it’s not an accurate worldview. And so the problem there is in your life and at work, you might be having tons of things that actually are working and are going well, but your brain’s attention will loop back to things that aren’t working and aren’t going well.
So in order to balance that, what we need to do is purposefully look for what is working. Purposefully look for what is going well. When I talk about spending time noticing and enjoying what is working, people get a little concerned sometimes. They might even get downright upset.
Clients will say, “What? You just want me to sit around enjoying myself,” as though that’s the absolutely worst thing ever. And I think it’s really funny because it’s like, we don’t want to enjoy things because we want to be doing this continuous improvement. But the only reason we want to be doing some continuous improvement is so we can hit some kind of metric or achieve some kind of goal.
And then we want to be happy when we achieve the goal. But it’s like we don’t want to be happy now. It’s like people have it backwards. They think being happy now will prevent them from achieving the goal, but I actually think that the opposite is true and that the more we can cultivate noticing and enjoying what is working, that can actually help fuel us towards our goals.
Usually we have a goal and we think if we achieve the goal, we’re going to be happier or more confident or more satisfied. And as part of that goal achievement, I like to suggest that there’s value in seeing the areas in our lives where we’re already happy, we already feel confident, we already feel satisfied.
But sometimes when I suggest this, people really resist it. So you may experience some resistance yourself when you think about doing this. But I want you to be curious about what I’m teaching you anyway because it’s really powerful and I think it can actually help us work even more towards our goals.
There’s this phrase that I love in coaching and it says the destination feels like the journey. So wherever we’re trying to go, whatever goal we’re trying to achieve, like I was saying before, when we get there, we want to feel confident, we want to feel happy, we want to feel satisfied. But the journey to that goal is going to feel like the destination.
So when we get all caught up in doing the hustle and doing the grind as we get to our goals and we get all caught up in doing the continuous improvement and not letting ourselves feel happy along the way, then we don’t have any practice feeling happy or satisfied or confident when we achieve the goal.
So instead, when we do this work, when we look for what is working in the now and we enjoy it on purpose, even if we want to do more improvement or achieve more goals, we actually have more practice. We’re better at being happy, we’re better at being confident, we’re better at being satisfied.
Yes, these are skills. And then they’re going to be available to us when we achieve the goal. So it’s not about us not achieving the goal because we’re busy being satisfied in the moment. That satisfaction when we cultivate that in the moment actually helps us achieve the goal.
So spending time noticing and enjoying what is working is an incredibly valuable activity. And there are several reasons for that. One of them we already covered in the intro, which is that it counteracts the brain’s natural negativity bias.
Like I was saying, left to its own devices, the human brain prioritizes the negative and this might seem like a bummer, and it kind of is, but it did keep our species alive. So evolutionarily, it matters. But it also means that our brains want to keep showing us bad news over and over again, while simultaneously de-prioritizing the good news.
They’ll de-prioritize the good news, they’ll discount the good news. They’ll sort of surprise is and actually pretend like it doesn’t exist. And when I say they, I mean brains. Human brains.
So there’s actually a study where they looked at how many pieces of “positive” data does the brain need to see to counteract one piece of negative data, and it was something totally staggering to me. It was like, five pieces. So because of that natural bias in the brain, if there’s one thing that our brain has decided isn’t going well, we actually need five things that are going well, just to create a balance.
So when we do this thing where we notice and enjoy what is working, it’s not about optimism. It’s actually about helping our brain be more balanced and helping our brain be more realistic about what is happening. And I love that. I think it’s so important.
I think focusing on the positive gets such a bad rap as “just being optimistic,” or even like, lying to ourselves. But it’s actually more realistic. So I think that’s a great reason to do it, but here’s another great reason. It creates enjoyable feelings. Many of us think that if we stop and have fun, we won’t get back on track.
But like I was saying before, the opposite is true. Noticing what is working feels good, and feeling good actually inspires us to do more of what’s already working. So at the beginning of the episode, I was talking about we’re going to talk about how to enjoy your work, even when everything isn’t going according to plan.
And this is what I’m talking about. When we slow down and we really force ourselves to think about what is working, what is going well, what is enjoyable, where do I feel happy, where do I feel confident, where do I feel satisfied, and we notice it, make space for it, give it our attention, that feels good.
So that alone is already going to bring up our enjoyment of our work. And it’s going to counteract the natural negativity bias so we’re going to be seeing ourselves and our work more clearly. But it also makes great fuel.
So any time we want to do something, it really helps if the brain associates doing that something with feeling enjoyable feelings. The brain likes to do more of things that feel good. We talked about this a little bit last week with ‘in the moment’ brain.
In the moment brain wants to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. So when we take the time to notice and enjoy what is working, that means that what is working becomes pleasurable and when it becomes pleasurable, we actually want to do more of it. So it requires less willpower.
And that is magical, right? So it’s the opposite of what we think. We think if we stop and enjoy what’s working, then we’ll be like, “That was good enough,” and we’ll, I don’t know, have a nap or something. But it actually makes us more likely to want to double down and keep working, whereas noticing what’s not going well actually makes us more likely to want to take a nap or go scroll social media or whatever.
Okay, here’s another reason why it’s really important and beneficial to notice and enjoy what is working. Noticing and enjoying what is working teaches us how to enjoy actual real life.
This is perhaps the most essential piece. There’s nothing wrong with continuous improvement of course, but if you’re operating on the assumption that you’ll be happier later when things are better, you’re wrong.
Why? Because we’re living the human experience, and in the human experience, there will always be things your brain thinks aren’t working. But this doesn’t have to be bad news. In fact, it could be great news. Because learning to enjoy the real imperfect now will help you enjoy the real imperfect later. And that’s magical.
So let me play this out for you. You’re in a job right now and there are some things that are going well and there are some things that are not going well. And you might have goals, and as we all know, I love goals, and we’ll totally work on your goals, and I will help you with your goals and we’re going to go all the way with the goals. We’re going to achieve the goals.
But even when you hit those goals, even when you achieve them, you're still going to be a human living a human life, and that means some things will still be happening in a way that your brain wishes they weren’t, or your brain will have new goals it wants to achieve.
So when you learn to notice and enjoy what’s working now, even though not everything is 100% perfect, that’s a skill. And that skill will be available to you in the future, and the more you practice that skill now, the better you’ll get at it.
So the more you enjoy your life now, imperfections and all, the more you’ll enjoy the future when you have created those goals. And I want to be clear, I’m 100% on board for you creating and achieving the goals. But also if you want to enjoy that, you’ve got to practice that now.
But speaking of goals, this is also a really good one. Noticing and enjoying what’s working now and creating space for that and putting attention on that will also reveal which goals you truly care about and which ones you only wanted because you thought you would feel better if you achieved them.
So like I said before, noticing and enjoying what is working now helps things feel better, and that will help you double down and do more effort. But it might be true that a few of your goals don’t seem important to you anymore.
When you learn to enjoy what is working and you create all those positive feelings and you notice and enjoy them, you’re going to learn about yourself. You’re going to learn what you actually want, like what your real goals actually are, and what you only wanted because you thought you couldn’t be happy unless you did it.
It’s so great to figure this out ahead of time though. So often people work for years and bust their asses to get to some achievement and then when they arrive at it, they’re surprised to find out that they don’t actually care about it.
And some of that I think is because - it’s like what I was talking about before. If you don’t enjoy the journey, you won’t enjoy the destination. But sometimes it’s also because we’ve chosen goals that didn’t really line up for us, but we hadn’t slowed down enough to realize they didn’t line up for us.
It’s like if we’re already happy, we don’t want that goal, whereas if we’re already happy, there are plenty of goals we still want. So as an example, you might think that you really want a certain title at work and that you need that title to be happy and feel good about yourself.
When you start noticing and enjoying what is working, you might find that you’re really happy with your current title, but what you really want is a pay raise. So in that case, creating that happiness, creating that confidence, creating that enjoyment ahead of time might help you really crystalize what’s the goal I care about and what’s the goal I only wanted because I thought I had to have it to feel satisfied.
So if you think you have to have the new title to feel satisfied, you’re going to go after it. But sometimes we go after goals like that and then we get them and then we realize that wasn’t actually the thing we wanted.
So when we go through the effort of noticing and enjoying what is working ahead of time, then that can really help us crystalize which goals do we want to keep going after and which goals do we not. And I think it’s interesting because when you notice and enjoy what is working, you’ll feel more fired up about some stuff and less fired up about other things.
So it’s not that our desire to achieve goals will go away. It won’t. It’s that our desire to achieve goals will become clarified and have additional focus. So just to recap, what we’re teaching is that you can enjoy your job now even if there are things you want to change about it.
You can enjoy your job now, even if not everything is going according to plan. And the way to do that is an extremely simple tool, which is just to notice and enjoy what is working and it’s also a habit and a practice. The more you notice and enjoy what is working, the better you’re going to get at that.
Even just 60 seconds a day to notice and enjoy what is working will change your life. And I want to be really clear. I’m not telling you to be more grateful. It’s not ever about that. In fact, I think there’s nothing that makes me less grateful than if someone tells me I should be grateful.
Instead of thinking about what should I be grateful for, we really want to focus on what is working? What’s going well? What do I like about this day? What do I like about this job?
So there you have it. That’s one habit that you can create and start today. And it’s super simple and it will completely change your work life. And on top of all that, let yourself enjoy this shift if you can. When you remember to notice and enjoy what’s working, just do that.
It’s not necessary to scold yourself for falling back into the habit of noticing what’s not working, if that’s what your brain’s been doing. Brains notice what’s not working. It’s just a thing they do. And when you notice your brain doing that, you can just say like, “Okay brain, but what is working?”
Because the brain has that natural negativity bias, it’s always going to go back to what’s not working and that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It’s just always an invitation to shift your focus back to what is working and to remind yourself like, this isn’t optimism. This is actually a more realistic view.
For everything that’s not working, I need just five pieces of data to even help my brain feel like we’re in balance. So the more you can notice what is working, the more it’ll feel like things are working, and they are. And the easier it will get to keep sticking with this practice.
And just remember, the more you do this work, the more you take the time to notice and enjoy what is working, the easier it will become and the more natural it will feel. In the very beginning, if it feels like nothing’s working, that’s totally normal. But just keep asking your brain, okay, but if something was working, what would it be? Okay, if I had to notice one thing I could enjoy, what would it be?
The more you ask yourself these useful questions, the more you’ll get useful answers. And listen, if you need some help retraining your brain in this way, I can help you with that. You don’t have to do it all alone. It’s okay if you want to, but if you want to go faster and learn how to do this in a super speed way, I can help you with that. And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper, and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that. There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. If you’re ready to take control of your career, create more meaning in your work, and finally, finally experience some lasting career satisfaction, this podcast is for you. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. We are going to talk about enjoying your work this week. And in the spirit of that, I’m going to share something with y’all that I enjoy about my work, and that is when y’all leave me lovely podcast reviews. Thank you so much to each and every one who has rated and reviewed the podcast. I so deeply appreciate it.
And I want to read one of your reviews and celebrate. So in December, I got a review called, “So many a-ha moments,” and the review says, “Recently took a risk and made a major career move and the podcast is not only helping me set up for success in this new path and work environment, but also offering plenty of a-ha moments that apply to other areas of my life I want to level up now that work is no longer the problem.”
Thank you so much for that review and you are welcome. I’m so delighted that the podcast is useful and I’m especially delighted that it’s useful not only for work but also for other areas. I get this feedback a lot and I always feel really happy about it because while the podcast is focused on work, I do think all of the teachings can be used in so many different ways.
I’ve specifically recently heard from someone who does creative work that it’s really helpful for her creative work as well. And so take these lessons and apply them to all the areas of your life. You can get a lot of value even beyond just the workplace.
And there’s also something else I wanted to mention about that review. In that review, the person is talking about having left their job and I think that’s so awesome. I love it when people leave their job to go pursue something else. And I wanted to say that clearly because this podcast is called Love Your Job Before You Leave It.
So in a lot of ways, yes, I’m encouraging you all to learn how to love the job that you are in, but it’s not because I’m against leaving the job that you’re in. I just think since learning to love a job is a skillset and something we can take with us, why not learn it where we’re at.
And then a lot of my clients actually end up staying in the job that they’re in because once they’ve learned to love it, well, then they love it and they don’t want to leave. But sometimes we learn to love something and we do still want to leave, and even if we haven’t learned to love it, you always get to choose.
If you’re ready to leave a job, you can do that whenever you want to. You have total free will. When I worked in corporate and I went through coaching as a client myself, I did learn so much that was helping me show up differently at work and have a better experience at work, and I still wanted to leave that job and start my coaching business.
And I didn’t 100% learn to love that job before I left it. I was willing to bring some of that work with me and then I’ve had to do that work in my business. So it’s not that one or the other is better. I just think if we already have a great job, like I did, sometimes it’s great to just go ahead and learn how to love it, and then we can go to the next thing fully loving it. But it’s not a hard and fast rule. So you always get to choose what you want to do, and the way you want to apply the things I teach in the podcast.
Alright, without further ado though, let’s get into a discussion of how you can enjoy your job more, even when things aren’t going 100% according to your plan, even if you’re planning on leaving this job, even if you want to do something else. Whatever the thing is for you, let’s talk about how to enjoy your job anyway.
If you’re anything like I used to be, you might be really good at finding ways to improve things. Like when I was in corporate, I was always looking for things that I could improve. Continuous improvement in my role, but also continuously improving my role so that I could enjoy it more.
And listen, this is an amazing skill. I am all about continuous improvement. But there’s also something to be said for enjoying the things that already are working. And we’ve mentioned this briefly on the podcast before but I wanted to take a deeper dive into it because it’s a simple thing to do but it creates life-changing, or rather work-changing results.
So what I’m talking about is noticing and enjoying what’s already working. And I want to be clear that it’s not so that we can just love everything and then never go back to our continuous improvement. But instead, it’s about helping us see that there are things that are working.
The human brain has a bias that orients us towards things that are negative, towards things that are possibly threats. It’s called negativity bias, but sometimes I even think of calling it like, threat bias. Our brain is constantly looking for what’s not working, what could go wrong, what’s dangerous, how could I maybe be hurt or get in trouble.
And our brain will continue to loop and loop and loop on that, and that looping can really push us towards wanting to do the continuous improvement. Our brain’s always bringing up potential threats and then we’re always addressing them.
But the thing is this is a bias. So it’s not an accurate worldview. And so the problem there is in your life and at work, you might be having tons of things that actually are working and are going well, but your brain’s attention will loop back to things that aren’t working and aren’t going well.
So in order to balance that, what we need to do is purposefully look for what is working. Purposefully look for what is going well. When I talk about spending time noticing and enjoying what is working, people get a little concerned sometimes. They might even get downright upset.
Clients will say, “What? You just want me to sit around enjoying myself,” as though that’s the absolutely worst thing ever. And I think it’s really funny because it’s like, we don’t want to enjoy things because we want to be doing this continuous improvement. But the only reason we want to be doing some continuous improvement is so we can hit some kind of metric or achieve some kind of goal.
And then we want to be happy when we achieve the goal. But it’s like we don’t want to be happy now. It’s like people have it backwards. They think being happy now will prevent them from achieving the goal, but I actually think that the opposite is true and that the more we can cultivate noticing and enjoying what is working, that can actually help fuel us towards our goals.
Usually we have a goal and we think if we achieve the goal, we’re going to be happier or more confident or more satisfied. And as part of that goal achievement, I like to suggest that there’s value in seeing the areas in our lives where we’re already happy, we already feel confident, we already feel satisfied.
But sometimes when I suggest this, people really resist it. So you may experience some resistance yourself when you think about doing this. But I want you to be curious about what I’m teaching you anyway because it’s really powerful and I think it can actually help us work even more towards our goals.
There’s this phrase that I love in coaching and it says the destination feels like the journey. So wherever we’re trying to go, whatever goal we’re trying to achieve, like I was saying before, when we get there, we want to feel confident, we want to feel happy, we want to feel satisfied. But the journey to that goal is going to feel like the destination.
So when we get all caught up in doing the hustle and doing the grind as we get to our goals and we get all caught up in doing the continuous improvement and not letting ourselves feel happy along the way, then we don’t have any practice feeling happy or satisfied or confident when we achieve the goal.
So instead, when we do this work, when we look for what is working in the now and we enjoy it on purpose, even if we want to do more improvement or achieve more goals, we actually have more practice. We’re better at being happy, we’re better at being confident, we’re better at being satisfied.
Yes, these are skills. And then they’re going to be available to us when we achieve the goal. So it’s not about us not achieving the goal because we’re busy being satisfied in the moment. That satisfaction when we cultivate that in the moment actually helps us achieve the goal.
So spending time noticing and enjoying what is working is an incredibly valuable activity. And there are several reasons for that. One of them we already covered in the intro, which is that it counteracts the brain’s natural negativity bias.
Like I was saying, left to its own devices, the human brain prioritizes the negative and this might seem like a bummer, and it kind of is, but it did keep our species alive. So evolutionarily, it matters. But it also means that our brains want to keep showing us bad news over and over again, while simultaneously de-prioritizing the good news.
They’ll de-prioritize the good news, they’ll discount the good news. They’ll sort of surprise is and actually pretend like it doesn’t exist. And when I say they, I mean brains. Human brains.
So there’s actually a study where they looked at how many pieces of “positive” data does the brain need to see to counteract one piece of negative data, and it was something totally staggering to me. It was like, five pieces. So because of that natural bias in the brain, if there’s one thing that our brain has decided isn’t going well, we actually need five things that are going well, just to create a balance.
So when we do this thing where we notice and enjoy what is working, it’s not about optimism. It’s actually about helping our brain be more balanced and helping our brain be more realistic about what is happening. And I love that. I think it’s so important.
I think focusing on the positive gets such a bad rap as “just being optimistic,” or even like, lying to ourselves. But it’s actually more realistic. So I think that’s a great reason to do it, but here’s another great reason. It creates enjoyable feelings. Many of us think that if we stop and have fun, we won’t get back on track.
But like I was saying before, the opposite is true. Noticing what is working feels good, and feeling good actually inspires us to do more of what’s already working. So at the beginning of the episode, I was talking about we’re going to talk about how to enjoy your work, even when everything isn’t going according to plan.
And this is what I’m talking about. When we slow down and we really force ourselves to think about what is working, what is going well, what is enjoyable, where do I feel happy, where do I feel confident, where do I feel satisfied, and we notice it, make space for it, give it our attention, that feels good.
So that alone is already going to bring up our enjoyment of our work. And it’s going to counteract the natural negativity bias so we’re going to be seeing ourselves and our work more clearly. But it also makes great fuel.
So any time we want to do something, it really helps if the brain associates doing that something with feeling enjoyable feelings. The brain likes to do more of things that feel good. We talked about this a little bit last week with ‘in the moment’ brain.
In the moment brain wants to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. So when we take the time to notice and enjoy what is working, that means that what is working becomes pleasurable and when it becomes pleasurable, we actually want to do more of it. So it requires less willpower.
And that is magical, right? So it’s the opposite of what we think. We think if we stop and enjoy what’s working, then we’ll be like, “That was good enough,” and we’ll, I don’t know, have a nap or something. But it actually makes us more likely to want to double down and keep working, whereas noticing what’s not going well actually makes us more likely to want to take a nap or go scroll social media or whatever.
Okay, here’s another reason why it’s really important and beneficial to notice and enjoy what is working. Noticing and enjoying what is working teaches us how to enjoy actual real life.
This is perhaps the most essential piece. There’s nothing wrong with continuous improvement of course, but if you’re operating on the assumption that you’ll be happier later when things are better, you’re wrong.
Why? Because we’re living the human experience, and in the human experience, there will always be things your brain thinks aren’t working. But this doesn’t have to be bad news. In fact, it could be great news. Because learning to enjoy the real imperfect now will help you enjoy the real imperfect later. And that’s magical.
So let me play this out for you. You’re in a job right now and there are some things that are going well and there are some things that are not going well. And you might have goals, and as we all know, I love goals, and we’ll totally work on your goals, and I will help you with your goals and we’re going to go all the way with the goals. We’re going to achieve the goals.
But even when you hit those goals, even when you achieve them, you're still going to be a human living a human life, and that means some things will still be happening in a way that your brain wishes they weren’t, or your brain will have new goals it wants to achieve.
So when you learn to notice and enjoy what’s working now, even though not everything is 100% perfect, that’s a skill. And that skill will be available to you in the future, and the more you practice that skill now, the better you’ll get at it.
So the more you enjoy your life now, imperfections and all, the more you’ll enjoy the future when you have created those goals. And I want to be clear, I’m 100% on board for you creating and achieving the goals. But also if you want to enjoy that, you’ve got to practice that now.
But speaking of goals, this is also a really good one. Noticing and enjoying what’s working now and creating space for that and putting attention on that will also reveal which goals you truly care about and which ones you only wanted because you thought you would feel better if you achieved them.
So like I said before, noticing and enjoying what is working now helps things feel better, and that will help you double down and do more effort. But it might be true that a few of your goals don’t seem important to you anymore.
When you learn to enjoy what is working and you create all those positive feelings and you notice and enjoy them, you’re going to learn about yourself. You’re going to learn what you actually want, like what your real goals actually are, and what you only wanted because you thought you couldn’t be happy unless you did it.
It’s so great to figure this out ahead of time though. So often people work for years and bust their asses to get to some achievement and then when they arrive at it, they’re surprised to find out that they don’t actually care about it.
And some of that I think is because - it’s like what I was talking about before. If you don’t enjoy the journey, you won’t enjoy the destination. But sometimes it’s also because we’ve chosen goals that didn’t really line up for us, but we hadn’t slowed down enough to realize they didn’t line up for us.
It’s like if we’re already happy, we don’t want that goal, whereas if we’re already happy, there are plenty of goals we still want. So as an example, you might think that you really want a certain title at work and that you need that title to be happy and feel good about yourself.
When you start noticing and enjoying what is working, you might find that you’re really happy with your current title, but what you really want is a pay raise. So in that case, creating that happiness, creating that confidence, creating that enjoyment ahead of time might help you really crystalize what’s the goal I care about and what’s the goal I only wanted because I thought I had to have it to feel satisfied.
So if you think you have to have the new title to feel satisfied, you’re going to go after it. But sometimes we go after goals like that and then we get them and then we realize that wasn’t actually the thing we wanted.
So when we go through the effort of noticing and enjoying what is working ahead of time, then that can really help us crystalize which goals do we want to keep going after and which goals do we not. And I think it’s interesting because when you notice and enjoy what is working, you’ll feel more fired up about some stuff and less fired up about other things.
So it’s not that our desire to achieve goals will go away. It won’t. It’s that our desire to achieve goals will become clarified and have additional focus. So just to recap, what we’re teaching is that you can enjoy your job now even if there are things you want to change about it.
You can enjoy your job now, even if not everything is going according to plan. And the way to do that is an extremely simple tool, which is just to notice and enjoy what is working and it’s also a habit and a practice. The more you notice and enjoy what is working, the better you’re going to get at that.
Even just 60 seconds a day to notice and enjoy what is working will change your life. And I want to be really clear. I’m not telling you to be more grateful. It’s not ever about that. In fact, I think there’s nothing that makes me less grateful than if someone tells me I should be grateful.
Instead of thinking about what should I be grateful for, we really want to focus on what is working? What’s going well? What do I like about this day? What do I like about this job?
So there you have it. That’s one habit that you can create and start today. And it’s super simple and it will completely change your work life. And on top of all that, let yourself enjoy this shift if you can. When you remember to notice and enjoy what’s working, just do that.
It’s not necessary to scold yourself for falling back into the habit of noticing what’s not working, if that’s what your brain’s been doing. Brains notice what’s not working. It’s just a thing they do. And when you notice your brain doing that, you can just say like, “Okay brain, but what is working?”
Because the brain has that natural negativity bias, it’s always going to go back to what’s not working and that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It’s just always an invitation to shift your focus back to what is working and to remind yourself like, this isn’t optimism. This is actually a more realistic view.
For everything that’s not working, I need just five pieces of data to even help my brain feel like we’re in balance. So the more you can notice what is working, the more it’ll feel like things are working, and they are. And the easier it will get to keep sticking with this practice.
And just remember, the more you do this work, the more you take the time to notice and enjoy what is working, the easier it will become and the more natural it will feel. In the very beginning, if it feels like nothing’s working, that’s totally normal. But just keep asking your brain, okay, but if something was working, what would it be? Okay, if I had to notice one thing I could enjoy, what would it be?
The more you ask yourself these useful questions, the more you’ll get useful answers. And listen, if you need some help retraining your brain in this way, I can help you with that. You don’t have to do it all alone. It’s okay if you want to, but if you want to go faster and learn how to do this in a super speed way, I can help you with that. And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper, and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that. There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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