Feeding Your Inner Fire: Find More Joy in Your Work by Understanding What Gives You Energy
Run a simple 30-minute work-life energy audit and design experiments to boost your motivation at work.
“You bring an infections energy and excitement into every room.”
Sparking magic is one of my superpowers, and that‘s not by chance. Over the last decade, I have cultivated this capacity by observing what gives me energy at work and doing more of whatever that is. That way, I foster an authentic, contagious enthusiasm for my work.
In the demanding dance of our work lives, understanding what gives us energy is like discovering a secret stash of fireworks. Some tasks just set our hearts aglow. By auditing our work for those energy givers and energy drainers, we can unlock a dazzling enthusiasm, turning our day into an intriguing adventure rather than a monotonous grind.
Work Has Become More Pleasant. Or Has It?
From a European perspective, work has become safer and more pleasant over the last decades for almost any profession. Work hours decreased. Breaks, time off work, and paid sick time are anchored in the law thanks to Workers’ Unions.
While physical demands have decreased, psychological stress has increased. Sick time off work for mental health reasons has increased in recent years (see the 2022 Statista report on how days off work due to mental illness in Germany have increased since 1997). While we know of the severe consequences that long-term stress has on our health, mitigation doesn‘t (yet) come as a structural approach, it‘s still up to the individual to manage their stress.
On average, we work 90,000 hours over the course of our lifetime, so why not be deliberate about making it worth our while, not just financially but on a human level? How do we feel at work? When are we most energised? Reflecting on those questions is the first step towards intentional change.
A Simple 30-Minute Work-Life Energy Audit
The work-life energy audit is a practice for self-discovery for anyone working in any industry or job. It is equally helpful for other parts of life. Whenever I run the exercise, I end up mixing work and life, and that’s ok. If you‘re not yet literate about your feelings, you might appreciate Gloria Willcox‘s Feeling Wheel as a vocabulary boost.
I like to grab a blank piece of paper and a pen and reflect:
⇢ 10 min: map activities that give you energy
⇢ 10 min: map activities that drain your energy
⇢ 5 min: explore how to do more of the things that give you energy
⇢ 5 min: ideate how to redesign the tasks that drain your energy
Perhaps you‘ll appreciate a neat Miro template?
All the small things: finding the branches and twigs
I like to think I have an inner fire. It has taken me time to realise that big chunks of wood aren‘t necessarily what makes it crackle and blaze best. It‘s the consistent addition of little branches and twigs that keep it cosy.
Have a look at the branches & twigs that fuel my inner fire:
What would your life look like a year from now if you spent a bit of time doing more of the small things that give you energy daily? Imagine that fire.
Small Experiments to Improve Our Work-Life
Now we’ve discovered what gives us energy and what drains it. What’s insight without action? As a software person, I think big change best comes in small increments framed as experiments. Based on insights from the work-life energy audit, I prepare experiments to more proactively design how I feel at work. I like to use this syntax:
“I believe that by [action], I will be able to achieve [outcome]”.
Lastly, I think about how I might measure progress and commit myself to a date when I‘ll revisit my experiment.
Example Experiments
Of course, everyone’s experiments will look different. By sharing my most recent experiments, I hope to inspire you to take action for yourself:
Exploring why my work matters
Who’s life is changing due to my work? How? Everyone’s why looks a little different. Gaining clarity about why my work matters helps me show up every morning with a smile: My why is to design a digital future that improves human life. I currently do this by helping teams learn how to design and develop meaningful software — while making their workdays a bit more fun.
If looking for your why is a topic that resonates with you, I recommend investigating the concept of Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Joyful Life.
Taking back control over my time
Observing when I am most productive and adjusting deep work and critical conversations accordingly helped me increase my impact. By inventing a personal prioritisation system, I can now more objectively judge what to spend my time on. By adding deliberate time to deal with unforeseeable urgent things like escalations, I ensure they don‘t always push back crucial strategic work. Plus: adjusting the definition of done for my work based on the criticality & impact helped me settle for “good enough” for less impactful things.
Meaningful human connection
I discovered that the 1:1 conversations that leave room for explorations beyond immediate work that are paramount for my sanity as a mostly remote person don‘t just happen by chance. I need to seek them out regularly and proactively to build lasting relationships. Having a background in user research, I am naturally curious about how other people experience the world. I learned to listen with the intention of having my mind changed.
If you‘re looking for inspiration to deepen your conversations, you might be surprised by the originality of 100 Questions: Work Edition.
Facilitating human collaboration
I’m fortunate to have a job that allows me to be in person with my team and customers regularly for strategic moments of collaboration. I like to design and facilitate workshops, and planning for a week on the road once every one or two months keeps the momentum up for the project and myself. When designing engagements with customers, I factor in travel budgets accordingly. I started training as a facilitator while at IBM iX in Berlin, where I later travelled the world teaching people Design Thinking.
If you’re curious about facilitation, I recommend looking at IBM’s free Design Thinking courses and their field guide.
Actively seeking inspiration to keep on learning
Another experiment I ran was creating dedicated time in my week to research, meander and look for inspiration. This almost sounds like a contradiction to point 2, optimising my time, but it isn‘t. Without getting inspired, what can we tap into when we need to be creative? I took on a role where projects rotate every couple of months so that I get to wrap my head around new challenges, customers and industries frequently because I know my mind is hungry to learn new things. What’s that comfort zone for anyway?
If you haven‘t yet, I recommend watching Carol Dweck‘s talk Developing a Growth Mindset, a celebration of the fact that our skills and intelligence are not something fixed but can be expanded over time.
Looking for the good and creating small wins
People tell me that I smile a lot and show up with positive energy, and it‘s true: I like to look for the good in things. I cultivated celebrating big and small wins within my team regularly and try to orchestrate work for incremental progress. According to The Power of Small Wins, making progress in meaningful work is the single most important ingredient for a positive inner work-life and, subsequently, one’s performance.
I recently attended three workshops by The School of Life that helped me recognise the beauty in setbacks: Adaptability, Resilience and How to Fail.
“If you stumble, make it part of the dance.”
Creating something every week
With a background in design, making beautiful and fun things matter to me, so I started to challenge myself to create something every week. That might be workshops, articles or talks. One thing I recently rediscovered for myself is sketchnote journaling: I document insights from books I read as scribbles. The new habit helps me to get inspired while creating something beautiful at the same time.
For the weeks that I just don‘t feel like I have it in me to create something more substantial, I put a box of LEGO next to my desk, so that, if nothing else, I can create a quirky LEGO monster.
What‘s Your First Experiment?
By learning to recognise what gives us energy and experimenting with implementing small changes to our work subsequently, we can craft our unique formula for success that yield the capacity to make us dance merrily through our work weeks.
What experiment might you run this week to redesign your work towards the things that give you energy?
A Compass to Navigate Our Careers
Few of us have the luxury of suddenly laying down all the work we don’t enjoy. However, applied consistently, the work-life energy audit is a reliable compass that can help us navigate our careers towards the energy-givers in the long run, like brewing the magic potion of tasks that light us up from within.
Credits
Nothing is written out of a vacuum. I was inspired by the perspectives of
- A special thanks goes to Nick, my former manager at VMware Tanzu Labs, who introduced me to the work-life energy audit exercise for the first time in a 1:1
- Thank you, Andrea; you recently called out my ‘infectious energy and excitement’ and inspired me to reflect more and write about the topic
- Numerous conversations with colleagues and friends about their inner fire, including someone who has recently had to step away from work due to burnout
- The book Why has nobody told me this before by Julie Smith
- The book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles
- The School of Life with their 100 Questions: Work Edition, as well as their fabulous workshops on Adaptability, Resilience and How to Fail
- Gloria Willcox‘s Feeling Wheel, a vocabulary boost for your feelings
- Carol Dweck‘s brilliant talk about Developing a Growth Mindset
- Articles in the GEO magazine, health edition (in German), particularly the issues What strengthens the soul, The healing power of physical movement
- Article: The Power of Small Wins, Harvard Business Review
- Article: How To Get Started With Sketchnotes, Smashing Magazine
- IBM‘s free Design Thinking courses, as well as their field guide, also The Workshopper Playbook by AJ&Smart and the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days