Mental arithmetic for on the job drive
It’s very possible that you don’t love or even like your job. That you somehow got into it for the wrong reasons and that it’s never resonated with you—not even once.
Moreover, it’s entirely likely that you’ve subscribed to the idea that if you don’t already have a passion for it, there’s almost you can do to make it so.
Hence the power of the following thought experiment (taken from solutions-focused therapy no less). It’s simple: sit down with a pen and a pad of paper, and ask yourself, ‘what would have to change for you to love your job?’
Then write down all the things you can do—today—to abruptly change your posture.
It might be changing your relationships with your employers, your clients, or your coworkers. Or lessening your workload, giving yourself more time than you have work to do.
It might be that you need to learn new skills to make your job better, easier or more fun. Or that your team needs to implement new software that makes it easier to communicate, organize tasks, or track your process.
It might be that you need to change your priorities—about what you want to accomplish by this time next year, or where you want to be in five.
Or it could be that you need to give yourself more room to grow, more leeway over your responsibilities, and more permission to take risks and learn from them. You might discover you need consistent encouragement (and motivation) to even do those things.
This exercise is not to say you are solely liable for your work relationship. To obfuscate your employers of their responsibility to you and your job and your motivation to continue to like it. But it is to say that you certainly have some say in the matter, probably more freedom than you give yourself credit for.
Knowing you have a choice about how you work and what projects you initiate and how you allocate your time can make a huge difference in how you carry yourself on the job. It might even propel you to stick with it long enough for it to change you, or you to change it.