Whenever I talk to someone about their desire to change jobs the question of money always arises. Clients who are thinking about making the leap from employment to going it alone always worry about their imagined inability to earn the same amount of money that they earn now. At the other end of that spectrum I can think of clients who have more money than they know what to do with but who seem to wade through a fundamental sadness so deep that it’s hard to see how their infinite resources can compensate. So it’s unsurprising to find out they don’t. How to be happy at work has, in the end, hardly anything to do with money.
Having panicked slightly yesterday morning when I realised that not only had I failed to write this weeks blog but I also had no idea what to write about, I had a conversation with a client about how much she hates her job. Then, like when waiting for a bus, once the first thought arrived several more followed straight afterwards leaving me with more inspirational buses than I needed. In my inbox appeared Penelope Trunk’s hilarious and uncompromising blog, and this time she is writing about how self employed people are happier in their work, and the dots begin too join in my head.
It’s not surprising that we place so much emphasis on money because without enough of it life is a hard grind. But we appear to have lost the ability to know when we have enough, when we reach the point where the law of diminishing returns dictates that for all the extra toil we put in the shiny trinkets which emerge at the other end are simply not enough.
The problem with accruing too much cash is that it becomes easier to tell ourselves that we should be happy and then, when we find that we are not, we feel confused and buy another speedboat, only to find that we still feel empty. Money helps us to focus more on what exists outside us rather than encouraging us to look at how we feel which has much more impact and costs nothing at all.
But the question of how to be happy at work runs much deeper than this. If you are fed up with your job you will be struggling in one or more of these three areas.
Autonomy.
We are happy at work when we are left to get on with it. This might offer an insight into why the self employed tend to be happier than those who work for someone else. We do what we want when we want to, literally. When we keep climbing up the corporate ladder to reach the next level of status and a higher salary what are we doing it for? Most of us are trying to reach a point of “freedom”. But what is freedom? Freedom to buy a bigger house, freedom to go and sit on an island? OK, so what is the purpose of that? Isn’t it happiness, contentment, balance, stability, emotional security? Isn’t it one, some or all of these? If that’s the case then your money is worth less than your ability to assume control over your days. When they pass as quickly as they do for me I could never go back to having someone else in too much control of them.
Mastery.
We are happy at work when we know what the hell we’re doing. When we are clear about how to execute our role, when we feel we are expert, that we have something which we can feel proud of it is almost impossible to feel anything less than satisfied. Once again it’s easy to see why the self employed might find it easier to achieve this because, if they don’t, its unlikely that people will pay for their services. Mastery becomes an imperative rather than a luxury. Furthermore in big organisations mastery is often used as control. The phrase “knowledge is power” is all about withholding mastery, avoiding the possibility that I might make you more effective than me. Without mastery we can never be truly happy because humans are designed to grow intellectually and emotionally, and no amount of money can ever compensate for a feeling of worthlessness.
Purpose.
We are happy at work when we know why we do what we do. The complexity of big business often makes it harder for us to understand why the role we play is important. What makes it worse is that we are sometimes treated as if we don’t matter at all. A fundamental human need in all of us is the need to know that our lives are valuable more widely than simply to ourselves. We need to be sure we are making a difference in some small way. If we understand what we are doing and the role it plays in success we feel we have a purpose. A career without purpose is like a life without purpose, directionless. This doesn’t mean that we all have to be engaged in something earnest and life saving, it simply means that we have to be clear about our place and why it matters. Money will help for a while but it cannot compensate in the long term because your soul runs on emotion not cash.
Regardless of whether you’re employed or running your own show ask yourself how much autonomy, mastery and purpose you enjoy in your working life. If you’re unhappy you’ll be struggling somewhere amongst them.
As I finish this piece I am sitting with my daughter as she revises for her forthcoming physics exam. She doesn’t like or understand physics (no mastery), sees little point in it (no purpose) but has to do it (no autonomy). Our education system prepares our children for getting themselves into work but only we can prepare ourselves for what we demand to get out of it.
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