Enjoying Your Work . . .

Enjoying the work you do is an important factor especially as we get older. I try to make it one of my priorities in my life because work takes up a huge portion of our lives and a huge amount of time and so i think it’s important to find work that is enjoyable and not something we do because that’s what we’ve been told to do.

I’ve questioned this about the work i had done in the past not only from the type of work i have done but more so the satisfaction i get from that work, and a lot of time i was working because it was a need of having to pay the bills, put food on the table, you know, the usual reasons we give as to why we are working but i hardly used to think about the effect my work is having on me mentally and physically.

I think that if you’re doing work over a long period of time and you’re not enjoying it, it does have a detrimental effect on a person over that long period of time. I was exactly like that going to work for money and not having any purpose and i started asking myself, ‘how did i end up here?’ But it was because i had fitted in to what everyone else was doing, hoping that ‘one day’ i’ll arrive at a place where i’ve got enough money or things will be better.

But what was happening was time was passing by and nothing was changing. I was getting hard on myself, blaming me for all the opportunities that had come my way but i didn’t take advantage of them, so here i was, stuck in a job i didn’t like, working with people that the majority of the time were negative and in the same position as me which didn’t make me feel any better either.

One of the things i did was to start working on myself mentally, especially about how i was talking and treating myself, and i found out that the happier i was becoming the better i felt not because anything had changed in regard to the work i was doing but more the work i was doing internally and i started to question the things i had believed about me over the years and whether they were true or not.

One of the things i did was listening to different types of audio material on places like youtube that started to change the way i was thinking. At the time, i was doing a driving job where i was delivering car parts to garages in the town where i lived and i used to drive a van that had a radio cassette player in it which tells you how long ago this was, but then they gave me a new van that came with a CD player.

So, what i started doing was buying blank CD’s and downloading the audio lessons i was listening to on youtube on to the CD’s and now i could listen to the lessons everytime i went out to do a delivery! I turned my van into a mobile classroom, which made the job a bit more enjoyable but i was educating myself mentally while i was still at work and it helped me change the way i was thinking.

Because in order to make a change in your life it has to start with a new belief and then that starts to affect your behaviour in a more positive way. I began to feel better, liked myself a lot more and i felt a lot more healthier because of the change of mindset. A lot of the time i was getting so frustrated because things weren’t changing for me but the answer is to start on the inside first and then the circumstances in your life will start to shape up for the better.

That’s when i began to think more about the enjoyment that my work gives me rather than just what i’m getting paid. It’s not about how much money you’re making, but how you’re making the money. Enjoy what you do first, then the other things will fall into place without a load of stress and anxiety and always wanting to be somewhere else further down the road to where you currently are.