133. Purposes of Work
Why do you work?
Like why have a job, a career, at all?
For money, probably. And healthcare, if you’re American like me.
You probably live in a capitalist economy, which means you need money.
Yes, for basic necessities like food and shelter.
And also for fun things like potted plants and tickets to that comedy show you’re so excited to see.
But what are the other reasons you work, what are the other things you get from your job, besides money (and healthcare)?
Are there other needs your job meets?
Other itches it scratches?
Other purposes that are fulfilled?
When I worked at Expedia, I asked myself this question.
And answering it changed how I felt about work while I was there.
It helped me in many ways, especially when I felt frustrated or wanted to leave (but felt like I couldn’t because of money and healthcare).
Purposefully reorienting the way you think about the reason for working can help you have a better experience of that work.
This can be especially valuable if you want to leave your job but aren’t quite ready to.
It can also be useful if you want to stay in your job but also want to have a more meaningful experience while you’re there.
Either way, it’s a good exercise, so join me and learn how to do it this week.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
A new framework for considering the purposes of work.
Why so many people feel trapped or stuck in their current career.
The power of discovering purposes of your work besides money (and healthcare).
What I discovered about the other purposes of work when I was in my corporate career.
How this framework can be applied to any area of your life.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about the purposes of work.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. 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. Happy Wednesday. I hope you’re having a glorious day. We’re having a very warm sunny day. It went from being chilly, but warming up in Sacramento to like full-on nearly summer weather. It’s funny, I was having happy hour with a friend of mine over the weekend, and she was saying Sacramento doesn’t really have a spring. It has winter and then one day of spring and then summer. And that kind of feels accurate to me.
It’s like before I moved here I thought like, “Oh, I’ll move there, and it’ll be really mild, glorious weather and then burning hot for a few months of the year.” But it really does feel like the transition from winter to summer happens like kind of, boop. And then the same thing with summer to fall to winter. One day of spring or two weeks of spring.
I mean, that being said, it’s warm and nice here now, it’s not as hot as it’ll be in the summer. But it feels summer-ish to me, like I think it’s going to be 90 within the week. So that feels pretty hot. But I’m still pretty happy to have the sun. I’m pretty happy to have short sleeve weather. And so that’s nice, too. I hope the weather’s nice for where you are. If you want to, you can come on Instagram and tell me what your weather’s like.
People always say that talking about the weather is like such small talk and not that exciting. But I think weather, at least for me, has a really big impact on how I feel in my day to day and how much I’m enjoying my day to day. And I like taking walks around my neighborhood, so weather has a big impact on that, too.
I was actually talking to another friend of mine who was saying the same thing, like people act like talking about the weather is such a small talk thing, but weather can be so impactful. So I really like to talk about the weather, and I feel like it’s not small talk. It’s a real topic over here.
All right, that’s enough of that. Let’s get into our topic for today. So for today I want to talk about the purposes of work. And that might seem like a weird topic, you might be like, “What? What do you mean? The purpose of work is we live in a capitalist economy and I need money and money is how I get shelter and food and all these other things.” And also, at least in American culture, work is tied to health insurance. So that’s another reason that people work, right?
We work to get the money and to get health insurance. And I get that. And I feel that deeply. But there’s this other framework that was really useful for me when I was back at Expedia several years ago when I was still in my corporate career. And so I want to share it with y’all today. And maybe I’ve talked about it before, but I don’t think we’ve done a whole episode on it. So we’re going to do a whole episode on it today.
So basically, the idea is, and I can’t remember where I got this idea, but I’m pretty sure I got it from someone else. So if I just had to guess for that phase of my life, it might have been Martha Beck because I love Martha Beck and I’ve read a lot of her books. And I think around the time that I was thinking this through was overlapping with the time that I was feeling very obsessed with her and her work.
So it might have been a Martha Beck thing, but I’m not 100% sure. So my apologies for not knowing about that. But basically, I knew when I was working at Expedia that I wanted to leave and start my own business. I knew that the sort of 40 hour workweek wasn’t a really good fit for me. I really loved being in the office with my coworkers, but I really hated commuting and getting to the office.
I’ve talked about before the hours that that role was, were really hard for me. When I took the job, I didn’t realize that that office kind of operated on like a 7am to 3am kind of schedule and that was definitely not where I was at in my life. I think even getting to the office by nine would have felt hard for me. And then it turned out to be way earlier than that.
So anyways, there was definitely a period of time there where I was succeeding and doing well and there was so much I liked about my job. But there was also this part of me that kind of didn’t want to be there, but felt trapped and felt like I had to be there because that was how I made money and that’s where I got my health insurance.
And as you can imagine, I felt pretty resentful about that. No one likes to feel trapped. You know, I take that back. Probably statistically someone likes to feel trapped, but most of us don’t like it. And I think that trapped is how many of us feel in our jobs. And I think a lot of times, again, tied to money, making money, and tied to health insurance, again, if you’re in American culture.
I realize there’s a lot of other countries in the world where your health insurance is not tied to your employment. And let’s be honest, I’m jealous of y’all. I think that sounds like a much better way to do things. But I live where I live and I’m part of the system I’m part of. I’m also really lucky because I get health insurance through my significant other’s corporate job. So I haven’t so far had to navigate the being self-employed getting insurance thing. But one day, quite possibly, I will need to navigate that.
So anyways, back when I was at Expedia I decided to do sort of a thought experiment because I was at this place in my life and career where I wasn’t going to quit my job. I still wanted to work there, but I wanted to enjoy it more. I wanted to have a better emotional experience of it, even knowing that it wasn’t a perfect fit for me. And it wasn’t ideally where I wanted to be, I also knew it was a really good fit for me in some ways.
And I knew that me telling myself I was trapped was making it a very unpleasurable, unenjoyable experience. If I was going to choose to stay there, I think I could tell that it would make sense to tell a better story about choosing to stay there because choosing to stay there, but choosing the story that I was trapped was kind of like the worst of both worlds.
So what I did was I got out a notebook and I wrote down “purposes of work.” And I had done kind of free writes like this before about what are the purposes of money? What are the purposes of work? What are the purposes of relationship? But I hadn’t done one about work yet.
And so I kind of was like, okay, for a lot of people the purpose of work, like I was saying before, is to get money so that we can live. So that we can have shelter, so we can have food, so we can have a car, so we can have clothing. So we can have fun things like trips and fancy dinners and drinks out. So that is usually for most people the main purpose of work. Again, money and health insurance.
And so I took those off the table. I was like, I already know that part of why I’m here, maybe even the main reason why I’m here, is money and health insurance. And I knew that that kind of felt like being trapped. There’s this phrase in the tech industry, like golden handcuffs or another one I’ve heard is velvet handcuffs. And the idea is that you feel trapped, right?
Like you’re there and it’s really pleasurable and nice in some ways, right? The idea of the velvet or the idea of the gold, like it’s really valuable, there’s a lot of financial value, but you feel stuck. You feel like you can’t leave. And I think for a lot of people, that feeling of stuckness, feeling like you can’t leave has to do with the money and the health insurance. And so that’s why I didn’t include those in my list because I already was aware of them, and I think I was almost too aware of them.
So I was like what are the other purposes of work? And basically, what I was inviting my brain to do here was to find other reasons for me to work and other value I was getting from it, other payoffs for me, other benefits, other purposes of staying in that arrangement. If I was staying in the arrangement anyways, I was staying in the arrangement and I was going to make the money and have health insurance.
But only thinking about the money and health insurance was creating resistance and resentment. It wasn’t feeling super delicious. Again, it was feeling kind of like being trapped. So I needed to purposefully, or I don’t know if I needed to, but I chose to purposefully reorient myself to the other things that I was getting out of work.
And I’m not sure where that notebook is, but I’m pretty sure that I wrote down three things and I know for sure one of them was community. The relationships at Expedia were really delightful to me. I made some really good friends there. Many of my first coaching clients were former colleagues from Expedia.
There are people from Expedia I’m still friends with today and I still talk to. And it’s been almost five years since I left, which isn’t that wild? I’ve been in business for almost five years. It’ll be five years this summer. Sometimes I think about that, like I’ve had my coaching business since the before times, like before the pandemic. And it’s kind of wild to me because that feels like a whole different life.
But anyways, that’s besides the point. While I was at Expedia, one of the things that really benefited me and felt delicious to focus on and to remind myself was a purpose of being there was the community and the relationships.
And when I wrote this list about what are the purposes of work besides money and health insurance, and I identified that that mattered to me, it gave me something that I could focus on and enjoy throughout my workday. And that was really fun. And that made working and being in that work environment more enjoyable while I was there, and it gave me a lot of value.
Okay, so that was one of them. I’m pretty sure another one of the purposes of work that I selected for myself when I did this exercise was mastery. So I was in internal communications and that wasn’t actually something I’d been trained in, but I did have a background in writing. And I had the skills to do the job, and I was learning things all the time also.
And I was learning all kinds of things, right? I was learning about internal communications, but I was also learning about IT because I worked in the IT department. And that was really fun. I learned a lot of stuff there and I think I became a lot more technically savvy after having been in that workplace.
I also learned things about working in corporate and what that was like, and having a nine to five, even though mine was a seven to three, and interpersonal relationships at work, right? So there was the community piece of the interpersonal relationships I had at the office, but there was also the mastery of learning how to be effective. And then how to be even more effective. And how to build strong relationships. And how to get to do the kind of projects I wanted to do. And how to navigate difficult conversations or navigate conflicts, stuff like that.
So that was really interesting. And, again, that gave me something else to focus on. When I focused on it, it reminded me that I had reasons that I liked to be there. And it wasn’t, again, just like, oh, I’m just here to get the paycheck, right? I’m just here because if I don’t, I won’t have any fucking health insurance.
And let’s see, what was the third one? I think the third one might have been something about autonomy and learning how to develop autonomy inside of a workspace. But I’m actually not 100% sure. And you know what? For reality, for the points of this podcast, it doesn’t actually matter because these were just the things that I found.
And I think what’s really going to matter for you is just the idea that you can find things like this. So if you’re in a job that isn’t a completely good fit, like maybe you want to get a different job, maybe you want to hop industries, maybe you want to start a side hustle, maybe you want to have your own business one day like me because you don’t want to work 40 hours a week and you want to work in a more flexible way. Or maybe you just want to work on different kinds of stuff than what it is you’ve been working on in your day job.
No matter what situation you’re in, what you can think about is like, what are the purposes of me being here? And then whatever the thing you’re used to being the purpose. So, again, for a lot of people, what they’re used to the purpose being is like, I got to make money and I need health insurance. There could also be, for some people they’re like, “Oh, I have to take this job because it’s a ladder or a stair step job to this other job I want.”
Especially when people are earlier in their career, they’re like, “Oh, well, I have to build up my resume.” So maybe you’re not sitting around thinking about the money and the health insurance, maybe you’re sitting around thinking like, “Oh, I have to do this job for two fucking years, so that then later I can get to do this other job.”
So whatever it is, whatever the thing is that you’re like, ugh, and you feel trapped by it’s just good to identify that. And then get a piece of paper and write down other purposes for work. And then come up with some that feel juicy and delicious to you. And it may take your brain a little while to come up with what those could be, but you do have the examples of mine.
Like the community, I know for a lot of people, the relationships that they have in their work life can be very satisfying. So that’s something that you can choose to focus on is, I’m choosing to be here anyways to get this one thing. But while I’m here, another need that this job is meeting or like another desire that this job is satisfying is community.
Or another desire that this job is satisfying as, again, like mastery and building mastery. And you can be building mastery in your skill set that you’re technically employed for. You can be building mastery and inter office relationships. You can be building mastery in negotiating a flexible schedule that works for you.
I’ve talked on the podcast before about how at Expedia after I’d been there for a while I arranged with my manager to have a slightly different work schedule where I got up and I first worked from my house for a little bit and then I came into the office later. So I didn’t have to keep trying to be in the office by 7am and failing, obviously.
And so I was able to negotiate that. And before I did that I’d never done anything like that. I didn’t even know that was really possible, but I saw someone else in the office negotiate something similar and I was like, oh, proof of concept. And then I tried it and so that’s something I did gain mastery over while I was at Expedia.
And for me, I was pretty sure that I was going to want to start and run a business and I was pretty sure that I was going to want to work with people about work. And so being at Expedia had lots of other subtle purposes like that, too, where I was like, “Oh, I’m learning firsthand similar things to what my clients will struggle with. And so that’s so valuable for me to be able to get this experience firsthand and to know what they’re going through.”
Isn’t that funny? Even before I’d really worked in corporate, I just knew that a lot of people who worked in corporate were deeply unhappy and didn’t want to be there and stayed because they needed to have a career, they needed to make money to provide for themselves and maybe their families and they wanted, again, to have health insurance.
And so I knew even going in that I was going to learn so much about other people’s experiences, so that then I could help them have a better experience of their experiences.
Anyways, so I wonder what it is for you, right? If you’re in a corporate job that you don’t want to be in anymore, but you’re not ready to leave, what could shift for you if you got a piece paper out and wrote like, here’s the purposes for work that I know about that I feel kind of resentful towards, like that I have to do this. And here are these other purposes of work, here are these other desires and preferences that are being met here that are really fun and interesting, even if I don’t want to be here forever.
And, of course, this can apply to other things, too. If there’s another situation in your life that you are in and you’re not willing or able to leave it immediately and you want to enjoy it more and resent it less, you can also do a similar thing.
Let’s say that you’re living in a city that you don’t prefer, and you want to move to a different city. But for some reason, you’re either choosing not to leave yet or there’s some kind of extenuating circumstance, like maybe, I don’t know, your partner is in grad school there and you don’t want to be away from your partner, but you don’t really like being in the city either.
So you could do this activity and you could be like, oh, the reason I’m here is because my partner is in grad school and I feel kind of resentful, maybe. And then what are the other purposes of being here, right? And then you can think through like, well, actually, maybe my partner in grad school has this really cool group of grad school friends, and I really like the friends and I really like their significant others.
So it could be just like my purposes for work at Expedia, where community was one of them. I didn’t want to stay there forever, but I was having a great time with the community that was there while I was there. And since I was there anyways, why not enjoy that?
And let’s be clear, this is not to bright side and not so you can be like, I love this thing that you don’t love and don’t want to be part of. It’s more just about reorienting yourself to when we’re choosing to do something, thinking about all the benefits we get from it can actually be very joyful and can feel a lot better.
It doesn’t mean we downplay what’s not working, right? It doesn’t mean we stay there longer than we have to. It just means like, it’s kind of like if you’re choosing not to change something, but you’re also like hating on it while you’re not changing it. I get that. Listen, I have an attitude problem also a lot of the time, and I deeply get that. And it might not feel great. It might actually make you feel like shit. And I think the bigger risk is it might make you feel resentful, it might make you feel trapped.
And it might make you feel hopeless over time if you keep telling yourself you don’t want to be somewhere, but you keep staying there. I think that can create a feeling like a sensation of hopelessness of like, well, I want to change, but I’m not, so maybe I can’t. And that’s, I think, not what we want. Versus I want to change, and I will be changing, but I’m not changing yet because I’m doing whatever.
Like for me at Expedia, I wanted to stay and pay off my student loans. And so I did. I stayed and paid off my student loans and I had a little savings. Honestly, in retrospect, probably not enough savings, I definitely ran out. But I paid off my student loans and I had a little savings before I quit to start my business.
And so for you, it’s like if you’re choosing to stay somewhere, can you honor that? Can you honor that you’re choosing it and you chose it for a reason? And you’re a smart person and so it’s a choice you’ve chosen to make, so we can believe it’s a good choice. And also, since you’re making that choice anyways, what could be the other benefits of making that choice that you can enjoy, while the choice is what you’re doing?
And I like to put it in the framework of purposes because I just felt like that opened up how I was thinking about it versus benefits. I did just call them benefits, but I think purpose is really interesting because it really forced me to think like, is the only purpose of work to make money? Like that didn’t seem right.
And also, if the only purpose was to make money, I was doing that. But I was clearly not totally happy. But by thinking about what other purposes there were, that really opened it up for it to be a much more fulfilling experience while I was choosing it. And for it to feel, again, meaningful, purposeful, right? Versus just like, oh, this is just like something I have to do to get this thing that I want.
So I want you to try this on. Whatever you’re doing that maybe you don’t want to do forever, but you’re choosing to do for now, what’s the purpose your brain always hinges on and feels trapped about? And then what are the other purposes for doing that? And what shifts in your life and your career and your relationships when you can kind of see things from that angle?
I think it’ll make wherever you are feel much better. And then that’s great because then you’ll have so much more emotional energy to make whatever changes you want to make. When we spend a lot of time feeling trapped and resentful, it can be very exhausting. And then when we want to make a change, we might not have the energy for it.
So let’s have a better experience. Let’s save up our energy to make the changes and choices we want to make in the future. Yeah, and then see what happens and report back. Come let me know on Instagram how it’s going for you.
And we also have three different ways we could work together if you want to take this work deeper with me and you want to really go all in on applying these principles in your life. So the three different ways I’m working with clients right now are, one, I have my brand new, Unhinged As Fuck yearlong coaching and mentorship opportunity.
Way number two is one on one coaching, which is six months of us working together. And we’ll have enough time to get plenty done, but it’s a smaller commitment than Unhinged As Fuck. And then the third way is Satisfied As Fuck, which is my small group coaching program. I’m opening another cohort in the fall.
This program, I love it. I think it’s just truly incredible. Like the one on one coaching, obviously, is also amazing. But there’s just nothing like doing this work in a cohort and community. And I think people really can leapfrog ahead because of the specific thing that happens with being a social mammal and doing the work together in a group.
So if you are interested in one of those coaching opportunities, scoot on over to my website and sign up for a consult. Let’s have a conversation about it. We’ll talk about what you want to create in your life and career and which of my current offerings would be the right fit for that.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. 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 women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. 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. Happy Wednesday. I hope you’re having a glorious day. We’re having a very warm sunny day. It went from being chilly, but warming up in Sacramento to like full-on nearly summer weather. It’s funny, I was having happy hour with a friend of mine over the weekend, and she was saying Sacramento doesn’t really have a spring. It has winter and then one day of spring and then summer. And that kind of feels accurate to me.
It’s like before I moved here I thought like, “Oh, I’ll move there, and it’ll be really mild, glorious weather and then burning hot for a few months of the year.” But it really does feel like the transition from winter to summer happens like kind of, boop. And then the same thing with summer to fall to winter. One day of spring or two weeks of spring.
I mean, that being said, it’s warm and nice here now, it’s not as hot as it’ll be in the summer. But it feels summer-ish to me, like I think it’s going to be 90 within the week. So that feels pretty hot. But I’m still pretty happy to have the sun. I’m pretty happy to have short sleeve weather. And so that’s nice, too. I hope the weather’s nice for where you are. If you want to, you can come on Instagram and tell me what your weather’s like.
People always say that talking about the weather is like such small talk and not that exciting. But I think weather, at least for me, has a really big impact on how I feel in my day to day and how much I’m enjoying my day to day. And I like taking walks around my neighborhood, so weather has a big impact on that, too.
I was actually talking to another friend of mine who was saying the same thing, like people act like talking about the weather is such a small talk thing, but weather can be so impactful. So I really like to talk about the weather, and I feel like it’s not small talk. It’s a real topic over here.
All right, that’s enough of that. Let’s get into our topic for today. So for today I want to talk about the purposes of work. And that might seem like a weird topic, you might be like, “What? What do you mean? The purpose of work is we live in a capitalist economy and I need money and money is how I get shelter and food and all these other things.” And also, at least in American culture, work is tied to health insurance. So that’s another reason that people work, right?
We work to get the money and to get health insurance. And I get that. And I feel that deeply. But there’s this other framework that was really useful for me when I was back at Expedia several years ago when I was still in my corporate career. And so I want to share it with y’all today. And maybe I’ve talked about it before, but I don’t think we’ve done a whole episode on it. So we’re going to do a whole episode on it today.
So basically, the idea is, and I can’t remember where I got this idea, but I’m pretty sure I got it from someone else. So if I just had to guess for that phase of my life, it might have been Martha Beck because I love Martha Beck and I’ve read a lot of her books. And I think around the time that I was thinking this through was overlapping with the time that I was feeling very obsessed with her and her work.
So it might have been a Martha Beck thing, but I’m not 100% sure. So my apologies for not knowing about that. But basically, I knew when I was working at Expedia that I wanted to leave and start my own business. I knew that the sort of 40 hour workweek wasn’t a really good fit for me. I really loved being in the office with my coworkers, but I really hated commuting and getting to the office.
I’ve talked about before the hours that that role was, were really hard for me. When I took the job, I didn’t realize that that office kind of operated on like a 7am to 3am kind of schedule and that was definitely not where I was at in my life. I think even getting to the office by nine would have felt hard for me. And then it turned out to be way earlier than that.
So anyways, there was definitely a period of time there where I was succeeding and doing well and there was so much I liked about my job. But there was also this part of me that kind of didn’t want to be there, but felt trapped and felt like I had to be there because that was how I made money and that’s where I got my health insurance.
And as you can imagine, I felt pretty resentful about that. No one likes to feel trapped. You know, I take that back. Probably statistically someone likes to feel trapped, but most of us don’t like it. And I think that trapped is how many of us feel in our jobs. And I think a lot of times, again, tied to money, making money, and tied to health insurance, again, if you’re in American culture.
I realize there’s a lot of other countries in the world where your health insurance is not tied to your employment. And let’s be honest, I’m jealous of y’all. I think that sounds like a much better way to do things. But I live where I live and I’m part of the system I’m part of. I’m also really lucky because I get health insurance through my significant other’s corporate job. So I haven’t so far had to navigate the being self-employed getting insurance thing. But one day, quite possibly, I will need to navigate that.
So anyways, back when I was at Expedia I decided to do sort of a thought experiment because I was at this place in my life and career where I wasn’t going to quit my job. I still wanted to work there, but I wanted to enjoy it more. I wanted to have a better emotional experience of it, even knowing that it wasn’t a perfect fit for me. And it wasn’t ideally where I wanted to be, I also knew it was a really good fit for me in some ways.
And I knew that me telling myself I was trapped was making it a very unpleasurable, unenjoyable experience. If I was going to choose to stay there, I think I could tell that it would make sense to tell a better story about choosing to stay there because choosing to stay there, but choosing the story that I was trapped was kind of like the worst of both worlds.
So what I did was I got out a notebook and I wrote down “purposes of work.” And I had done kind of free writes like this before about what are the purposes of money? What are the purposes of work? What are the purposes of relationship? But I hadn’t done one about work yet.
And so I kind of was like, okay, for a lot of people the purpose of work, like I was saying before, is to get money so that we can live. So that we can have shelter, so we can have food, so we can have a car, so we can have clothing. So we can have fun things like trips and fancy dinners and drinks out. So that is usually for most people the main purpose of work. Again, money and health insurance.
And so I took those off the table. I was like, I already know that part of why I’m here, maybe even the main reason why I’m here, is money and health insurance. And I knew that that kind of felt like being trapped. There’s this phrase in the tech industry, like golden handcuffs or another one I’ve heard is velvet handcuffs. And the idea is that you feel trapped, right?
Like you’re there and it’s really pleasurable and nice in some ways, right? The idea of the velvet or the idea of the gold, like it’s really valuable, there’s a lot of financial value, but you feel stuck. You feel like you can’t leave. And I think for a lot of people, that feeling of stuckness, feeling like you can’t leave has to do with the money and the health insurance. And so that’s why I didn’t include those in my list because I already was aware of them, and I think I was almost too aware of them.
So I was like what are the other purposes of work? And basically, what I was inviting my brain to do here was to find other reasons for me to work and other value I was getting from it, other payoffs for me, other benefits, other purposes of staying in that arrangement. If I was staying in the arrangement anyways, I was staying in the arrangement and I was going to make the money and have health insurance.
But only thinking about the money and health insurance was creating resistance and resentment. It wasn’t feeling super delicious. Again, it was feeling kind of like being trapped. So I needed to purposefully, or I don’t know if I needed to, but I chose to purposefully reorient myself to the other things that I was getting out of work.
And I’m not sure where that notebook is, but I’m pretty sure that I wrote down three things and I know for sure one of them was community. The relationships at Expedia were really delightful to me. I made some really good friends there. Many of my first coaching clients were former colleagues from Expedia.
There are people from Expedia I’m still friends with today and I still talk to. And it’s been almost five years since I left, which isn’t that wild? I’ve been in business for almost five years. It’ll be five years this summer. Sometimes I think about that, like I’ve had my coaching business since the before times, like before the pandemic. And it’s kind of wild to me because that feels like a whole different life.
But anyways, that’s besides the point. While I was at Expedia, one of the things that really benefited me and felt delicious to focus on and to remind myself was a purpose of being there was the community and the relationships.
And when I wrote this list about what are the purposes of work besides money and health insurance, and I identified that that mattered to me, it gave me something that I could focus on and enjoy throughout my workday. And that was really fun. And that made working and being in that work environment more enjoyable while I was there, and it gave me a lot of value.
Okay, so that was one of them. I’m pretty sure another one of the purposes of work that I selected for myself when I did this exercise was mastery. So I was in internal communications and that wasn’t actually something I’d been trained in, but I did have a background in writing. And I had the skills to do the job, and I was learning things all the time also.
And I was learning all kinds of things, right? I was learning about internal communications, but I was also learning about IT because I worked in the IT department. And that was really fun. I learned a lot of stuff there and I think I became a lot more technically savvy after having been in that workplace.
I also learned things about working in corporate and what that was like, and having a nine to five, even though mine was a seven to three, and interpersonal relationships at work, right? So there was the community piece of the interpersonal relationships I had at the office, but there was also the mastery of learning how to be effective. And then how to be even more effective. And how to build strong relationships. And how to get to do the kind of projects I wanted to do. And how to navigate difficult conversations or navigate conflicts, stuff like that.
So that was really interesting. And, again, that gave me something else to focus on. When I focused on it, it reminded me that I had reasons that I liked to be there. And it wasn’t, again, just like, oh, I’m just here to get the paycheck, right? I’m just here because if I don’t, I won’t have any fucking health insurance.
And let’s see, what was the third one? I think the third one might have been something about autonomy and learning how to develop autonomy inside of a workspace. But I’m actually not 100% sure. And you know what? For reality, for the points of this podcast, it doesn’t actually matter because these were just the things that I found.
And I think what’s really going to matter for you is just the idea that you can find things like this. So if you’re in a job that isn’t a completely good fit, like maybe you want to get a different job, maybe you want to hop industries, maybe you want to start a side hustle, maybe you want to have your own business one day like me because you don’t want to work 40 hours a week and you want to work in a more flexible way. Or maybe you just want to work on different kinds of stuff than what it is you’ve been working on in your day job.
No matter what situation you’re in, what you can think about is like, what are the purposes of me being here? And then whatever the thing you’re used to being the purpose. So, again, for a lot of people, what they’re used to the purpose being is like, I got to make money and I need health insurance. There could also be, for some people they’re like, “Oh, I have to take this job because it’s a ladder or a stair step job to this other job I want.”
Especially when people are earlier in their career, they’re like, “Oh, well, I have to build up my resume.” So maybe you’re not sitting around thinking about the money and the health insurance, maybe you’re sitting around thinking like, “Oh, I have to do this job for two fucking years, so that then later I can get to do this other job.”
So whatever it is, whatever the thing is that you’re like, ugh, and you feel trapped by it’s just good to identify that. And then get a piece of paper and write down other purposes for work. And then come up with some that feel juicy and delicious to you. And it may take your brain a little while to come up with what those could be, but you do have the examples of mine.
Like the community, I know for a lot of people, the relationships that they have in their work life can be very satisfying. So that’s something that you can choose to focus on is, I’m choosing to be here anyways to get this one thing. But while I’m here, another need that this job is meeting or like another desire that this job is satisfying is community.
Or another desire that this job is satisfying as, again, like mastery and building mastery. And you can be building mastery in your skill set that you’re technically employed for. You can be building mastery and inter office relationships. You can be building mastery in negotiating a flexible schedule that works for you.
I’ve talked on the podcast before about how at Expedia after I’d been there for a while I arranged with my manager to have a slightly different work schedule where I got up and I first worked from my house for a little bit and then I came into the office later. So I didn’t have to keep trying to be in the office by 7am and failing, obviously.
And so I was able to negotiate that. And before I did that I’d never done anything like that. I didn’t even know that was really possible, but I saw someone else in the office negotiate something similar and I was like, oh, proof of concept. And then I tried it and so that’s something I did gain mastery over while I was at Expedia.
And for me, I was pretty sure that I was going to want to start and run a business and I was pretty sure that I was going to want to work with people about work. And so being at Expedia had lots of other subtle purposes like that, too, where I was like, “Oh, I’m learning firsthand similar things to what my clients will struggle with. And so that’s so valuable for me to be able to get this experience firsthand and to know what they’re going through.”
Isn’t that funny? Even before I’d really worked in corporate, I just knew that a lot of people who worked in corporate were deeply unhappy and didn’t want to be there and stayed because they needed to have a career, they needed to make money to provide for themselves and maybe their families and they wanted, again, to have health insurance.
And so I knew even going in that I was going to learn so much about other people’s experiences, so that then I could help them have a better experience of their experiences.
Anyways, so I wonder what it is for you, right? If you’re in a corporate job that you don’t want to be in anymore, but you’re not ready to leave, what could shift for you if you got a piece paper out and wrote like, here’s the purposes for work that I know about that I feel kind of resentful towards, like that I have to do this. And here are these other purposes of work, here are these other desires and preferences that are being met here that are really fun and interesting, even if I don’t want to be here forever.
And, of course, this can apply to other things, too. If there’s another situation in your life that you are in and you’re not willing or able to leave it immediately and you want to enjoy it more and resent it less, you can also do a similar thing.
Let’s say that you’re living in a city that you don’t prefer, and you want to move to a different city. But for some reason, you’re either choosing not to leave yet or there’s some kind of extenuating circumstance, like maybe, I don’t know, your partner is in grad school there and you don’t want to be away from your partner, but you don’t really like being in the city either.
So you could do this activity and you could be like, oh, the reason I’m here is because my partner is in grad school and I feel kind of resentful, maybe. And then what are the other purposes of being here, right? And then you can think through like, well, actually, maybe my partner in grad school has this really cool group of grad school friends, and I really like the friends and I really like their significant others.
So it could be just like my purposes for work at Expedia, where community was one of them. I didn’t want to stay there forever, but I was having a great time with the community that was there while I was there. And since I was there anyways, why not enjoy that?
And let’s be clear, this is not to bright side and not so you can be like, I love this thing that you don’t love and don’t want to be part of. It’s more just about reorienting yourself to when we’re choosing to do something, thinking about all the benefits we get from it can actually be very joyful and can feel a lot better.
It doesn’t mean we downplay what’s not working, right? It doesn’t mean we stay there longer than we have to. It just means like, it’s kind of like if you’re choosing not to change something, but you’re also like hating on it while you’re not changing it. I get that. Listen, I have an attitude problem also a lot of the time, and I deeply get that. And it might not feel great. It might actually make you feel like shit. And I think the bigger risk is it might make you feel resentful, it might make you feel trapped.
And it might make you feel hopeless over time if you keep telling yourself you don’t want to be somewhere, but you keep staying there. I think that can create a feeling like a sensation of hopelessness of like, well, I want to change, but I’m not, so maybe I can’t. And that’s, I think, not what we want. Versus I want to change, and I will be changing, but I’m not changing yet because I’m doing whatever.
Like for me at Expedia, I wanted to stay and pay off my student loans. And so I did. I stayed and paid off my student loans and I had a little savings. Honestly, in retrospect, probably not enough savings, I definitely ran out. But I paid off my student loans and I had a little savings before I quit to start my business.
And so for you, it’s like if you’re choosing to stay somewhere, can you honor that? Can you honor that you’re choosing it and you chose it for a reason? And you’re a smart person and so it’s a choice you’ve chosen to make, so we can believe it’s a good choice. And also, since you’re making that choice anyways, what could be the other benefits of making that choice that you can enjoy, while the choice is what you’re doing?
And I like to put it in the framework of purposes because I just felt like that opened up how I was thinking about it versus benefits. I did just call them benefits, but I think purpose is really interesting because it really forced me to think like, is the only purpose of work to make money? Like that didn’t seem right.
And also, if the only purpose was to make money, I was doing that. But I was clearly not totally happy. But by thinking about what other purposes there were, that really opened it up for it to be a much more fulfilling experience while I was choosing it. And for it to feel, again, meaningful, purposeful, right? Versus just like, oh, this is just like something I have to do to get this thing that I want.
So I want you to try this on. Whatever you’re doing that maybe you don’t want to do forever, but you’re choosing to do for now, what’s the purpose your brain always hinges on and feels trapped about? And then what are the other purposes for doing that? And what shifts in your life and your career and your relationships when you can kind of see things from that angle?
I think it’ll make wherever you are feel much better. And then that’s great because then you’ll have so much more emotional energy to make whatever changes you want to make. When we spend a lot of time feeling trapped and resentful, it can be very exhausting. And then when we want to make a change, we might not have the energy for it.
So let’s have a better experience. Let’s save up our energy to make the changes and choices we want to make in the future. Yeah, and then see what happens and report back. Come let me know on Instagram how it’s going for you.
And we also have three different ways we could work together if you want to take this work deeper with me and you want to really go all in on applying these principles in your life. So the three different ways I’m working with clients right now are, one, I have my brand new, Unhinged As Fuck yearlong coaching and mentorship opportunity.
Way number two is one on one coaching, which is six months of us working together. And we’ll have enough time to get plenty done, but it’s a smaller commitment than Unhinged As Fuck. And then the third way is Satisfied As Fuck, which is my small group coaching program. I’m opening another cohort in the fall.
This program, I love it. I think it’s just truly incredible. Like the one on one coaching, obviously, is also amazing. But there’s just nothing like doing this work in a cohort and community. And I think people really can leapfrog ahead because of the specific thing that happens with being a social mammal and doing the work together in a group.
So if you are interested in one of those coaching opportunities, scoot on over to my website and sign up for a consult. Let’s have a conversation about it. We’ll talk about what you want to create in your life and career and which of my current offerings would be the right fit for that.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. 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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