How to fall in love with your job again

We need to work to earn the money we need to live. But there should be more to your job than the cycle of get up, get to work, and grind away at the daily grind. So how do you get the passion back? Try turning your job into something beautiful, advises our award-winning Change Exchange blogger, Scott Dunlop

If you ask people what word they most associate with “work”, you’d probably get answers like “responsibility” or “hard”. We spend so many of our waking hours working in this deeply committed relationship without engaging with the nature of it.

Chuck Palahniuk put it rather cynically in his novel Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” Some days we can relate to this, especially after the debit orders ping their way through your phone, but there’s a way out. A way to fall in love with your job again.

Don’t get me wrong- I adore my current job. I have, in the past, allowed my relationship with a job to grow cold to the point that every morning my belly would churn in anxiety at the idea of having to get up and face the same environment all day. That kind of numbness creates a cycle of depression which is hard to break.

I fell out of love with the job and resentment crept in.

Part of it was in the way I approached it in my head. I had loved the daily tasks but then the salary didn’t meet my needs. It became an annoyance that gnawed away at me. I’d argue with myself- why should I have to put in these long hours and weekend shifts away from my kids with nothing to show for it after the bills have been paid?

Futile thinking in the same way that not addressing habits like leaving clothes on the floor can cause a marriage to unravel. The problem isn’t the clothes, it’s the thinking (or lack of it) that interferes with the relationship.

Responsibility isn’t bad. It costs money to live, and I work to pay for food, clothes and the roof over my head. I am responsible for that, and, having been unemployed before, I am grateful for employment. Responsibility is a dull word, though, lacking in emotion and character. If responsibility was a person, it would be a sociopath. Seeing your job as only this is self-defeating.

One guy helped me to adapt my thinking about work, though, and his approach has revolutionised the way think about my job. Each conversation with him brought out more awareness about what we were doing. He is a remarkable, humble man who sets himself seemingly impossible goals and then achieves them. I am not remarkable in that sense, but I adore his unlimited thinking approach to work.

We rarely discussed the projects themselves, but he’d ask how I was doing, what I was thinking about, how I felt about some issue in the world. Then he’d say that we could change this, adapt that, make things work better. He taught me to see that a job needn’t be limited to the job description- indeed, it shouldn’t be- but passion can be injected into everything.

I’m not saying you can simply claim that a dented old tin pot is really a golden chalice. The reality is that many people work in a static environment in which nothing changes. Much like a relationship can plod along with no relating taking place. There’s a chance you may feel that a change in career is necessary before you can love your job, but the grass isn’t always greener: if you go into another job with the same frame of mind, you could be heading for disappointment.

I tried changing careers to get rid of the dull anxiety,       but it followed me to my new job. It wasn’t the job that was the problem; it was that I had no emotional involvement with it. It was an impersonal means to an end.

Forgetting that you’re human is a needless fatal error. We need to feed our spirits, souls, minds – however you best articulate that which inspires you and keeps you excited about life. If you feel like you’re falling out of love with your job, you can inspire yourself to fall in love again by making it something beautiful.

Now, I know what it is to fall in love with a wonderful woman, but that’s our own story. It doesn’t make me an expert. I do know that keeping the passion alive is important. I can’t tell you how to fall in love with your job again, but I am convinced that keeping yourself growing is central to your emotional health and essential in order to keep that relationship with your job a living, breathing daily romance.