The Four Simple Keys to Happiness at Work

Many people resign themselves to a career of drudgery. The solution is a shift in mindset: 4 simple keys that, over time, compound into greater levels of happiness and motivation at work.

Everyone can love their work.

Does that sound crazy? If so, it’s because we collectively hold untrue beliefs about work that limit us both from doing work we love and loving the work that we do. Do any of these sound familiar?

• Work can’t be meaningful and profitable. “You can either do good at a non-profit, or make money at a for profit, but not both. “
• Work isn’t fun. “There is a reason they call it ‘work.’ It’s because it’s not fun.”
• I can’t make money doing the things I like. “I love mountain biking, but I’m not good enough to be a professional mountain biker, and they don’t make very much anyway.”
• I don’t like anything. “I’d work to get my dream job if I knew what I wanted to do, but I have no idea what my purpose is.”

These limiting beliefs repeatedly stop many of us from working toward our fulfillment. Instead, we keep showing up for jobs we don’t particularly like and spend the day wishing we were elsewhere. That’s not a good recipe for happiness or for work. Here are four simple keys — mindsets that, as an approach to your career, will lead you to happiness.

1. look for happiness in experience, not in outcomes

Do you look for happiness in outcomes? Do you ever think “I will be happy when…”? Many of us do. It’s a pervasive mental bias to think that a hard-earned victory will change our emotions over the long term. But typically after major life events, both positive and negative, our happiness level reverts to more or less where it was before the event. Psychologists call this effect hedonic adaptation.

The reason for hedonic adaptation is that emotions result from experience, not from outcomes. The experience of getting promoted, for example, can certainly lead to happiness in the short term, but the boost often fades. A few months down the road, the experience of receiving the promotion — a meeting and maybe a celebratory dinner — is long since over. Happiness then results from the experience of the new role. Once the new title feels normal and if the work isn’t any more enjoyable than before, emotionally you’re in the same spot as before.

Outcomes do matter. Your goals frame and direct your experiences. Their achievement enable new types of experience. But for the sake of your happiness, choose your goals based on the outcome (does this new state enable an experience I value?) and the process (will I enjoy getting there?).

Shortcut: Happiness is an experience

Consider: Is the process needed to achieve my current goals something I enjoy? Will I enjoy any changes to process that result from having accomplished my goals?

2. stop looking for someone else to make you happy

Your work can’t make you happy. Your boss can’t make you happy. Your partner can’t make you happy. Only you can. It’s up to you because your emotions are the result of both the things that happen outside of you (circumstances) and the things that happen inside of you (beliefs). Only you can control and experience both. The people around you may do their best to create conditions that are conducive to your contentment, but you’ve got to take advantage.

Happiness is like being in shape. It may not easy to be in shape, particularly if the circumstances of your life limit your time for working out and making meals and your budget for healthy food. But, we know it’s possible to be in shape, even in those difficult conditions, because many people are. Even if your employer and your family prepared you the healthiest meals and provided the time, space and equipment for working out, it would still be up to you to eat healthy food in the right portions, skip out on unhealthy food, and exercise. No matter the ease or difficulty of happiness at work, it’s up to you. So stop waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Shortcut: You are the author of your happiness

Consider: What am I waiting for someone else to do for me to be happy? Can I do it myself or ask for help?

3. pay attention to and be honest about what you like and don’t like

The only person who truly knows what type of experiences lead to your happiness is you. The way you know is by paying attention to what you’re feeling. But we’re trained precisely not to pay attention to the information our bodies send us about our happiness, particularly at work. We’ve collectively agreed to make emotions part of our personal lives, but not our professional lives. As a result, we take jobs we don’t like, or, surprisingly, we don’t notice that we like the jobs we have.

As we grow up, our elders feed us a steady diet of advice about what we “should” do — code for things we don’t like that they expect us to do anyway. “Study this subject that you’re not interested in so you can get into a good college.” “Go to the most selective college you get into (rather than the one you like the most) so you can get a good job.” “Take the job that pays the most.” If you continually engage in experiences you don’t enjoy or value, you’ll have trouble finding happiness.

It’s no surprise that people would rather be at leisure than at the office. But studies show that, strangely, many people actually enjoy their work and only think that they don’t. If you track people’s mood throughout the day, they self-report greater happiness and sharper engagement on the clock than off; work has all of the creative, engaging, social elements needed for happiness. In a particular study of 4,800 workers, respondents reported high engagement 54% of the time at work. That figure plummeted to just 18% when they were on their own time, with feelings of apathy clouding over half of their leisure activity. That misalignment of belief and actual emotion can only be remedied by paying attention to what’s going on around — and inside of you — and continuously asking, “do I enjoy this?” (1)

Shortcut: Pay attention to find out what you value

Consider: What experiences do you enjoy at work? How can you shift your work toward doing those more? Can you change something about the experiences you don’t like to make them more like the ones you do?

4. harness negative emotion to grow toward happiness

Another pervasive bias is the assumption that negative emotions are the opposite of positive emotions. We therefore view them as the enemy and seek to avoid them. But in reality, happiness is a process of continually correcting for negative emotion in the same way that riding a bike is a process of continually correcting for falling to one side or the other. If you avoided tipping over while riding a bike, you’d also be avoiding your ability to counterbalance and thus to stay upright. Sure, it’s bad to fall to the left, but the solution is to shift your weight and fall to the right just enough to tip back up.

Rather than avoid negative emotion, or repress it when it comes up (often the case when it comes to work), use it to learn or to change something. Negative emotion is a signal, not a failure. What would it mean to listen to the signal?

Shortcut: Negative emotion is a signal about how to be happy

Consider: What is bothering me right now? How does it make me feel? What beliefs do I hold that lead to my feelings? What do I want? What am I going to do? Or, try our tension processing exercise.

Building a happy career doesn’t necessarily mean leaving the organization you currently work for. Pay attention. Do you like your work? What don’t you like? If you actually investigate your own emotions and are willing to share your preferences, your team will thank you. Leaders all around the world are trying to figure out “how can I motivate my employees?” The truth is, employees are already motivated — by the things they like. Smart leaders want to align their teams, not just according to their strengths, but also to their motivations.

There is no quick solution to being happy with your career. There’s no other way to fulfillment that by showing up and doing the work. As you begin to understand more richly the processes you enjoy, you’ll have to make life changes. Can you acquire new skills to support the experiences you value? How about seeking out new roles that align with them? Are you willing to continuously make changes to bring your life into harmony with what matters to you, or do you prefer to blame your dissatisfaction on your mortgage, your kids’ school tuition and your car payment? It would likely be impossible to move from dissatisfaction to robust happiness in a few weeks. But what if you took the next five years to shift your career — from the one everyone told you you “should” be building — to the one you really want? It might make all the difference.

You might enjoy:

• Why Finding Your Purpose Is The Most Important Thing You Will Ever Do
• Tension Processing: A tool for understanding and harnessing your negative emotions

Notes:

‎(1) Source: M. Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”

(2) Photo Credit: Better than bacon, “I learn to ride a bike.” adapted