Change Your Life: Experience Your Work as a Calling

Don't like your job?
1) Find work that is meaningful, or
2) Find something meaningful in your work

“This is the true joy in life –
being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty one”

(George Bernard Shaw)

We spend a good part of our working hours at work, and yet many people derive little meaning from what occupies them for several thousand hours each year. If we do not experience a sense of purpose in our work, we can choose to do one of two things (aside from resigning ourselves to being unhappy): find work that is meaningful or find something meaningful in our work.

We don’t all have the luxury of having the perfect job – the one that reflects our values, where we work only with people we like, and whose atmosphere precisely suits our temperament. But even if we do not find ourselves in that ideal setting, we have a great deal of choice as to how we experience our daily work. Whether as a CEO or a salesman, an investment banker or a community organizer, a minister or a manager, a janitor or a cleaner – not complete control, perhaps, but some – over what elements of our work we focus on, and consequently, on how we experience our working life.

We can, for example, remind ourselves how our work is making a difference in other people’s lives; we can focus on the elements that we find exciting and interesting, the meaningful interactions that we have with colleagues and customers; or we can appreciate the opportunity our work gives us to develop or expand our professional skills. If we can find no inherent value in our current occupation, we can tell ourselves that our work is our current occupation, we can tell ourselves that our work provides for us and for those we care about, or that it enables us to engage in meaningful activities after hours.

Researchers have found that those who made the choice, conscious or not, to see their work as merely a job, were less happy, were less satisfied with their life, than were their colleagues who viewed what they did a calling. “Even in the most restricted and routine jobs,” the study concluded, “employees can exert some influence on what is the essence of their work.”

Don’t treat the work you do as a job,

Experience your work as a calling.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

 References:

1. Choose the Life You Want: 101 Ways to Create You Own Road to Happiness by Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD (New York: The Experiment, 2012) Buy this book!

2. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life by D. William (New York: Free Press, 2009).