In honor of Valentine’s Day, today I’m sharing some ways you can show yourself a little more love by creating a career you are truly excited about.
I firmly believe that one of the best ways to practice self-care is to create a career you truly love.
Think about it this way: On any given weekday, you likely spend more time and energy working than doing anything else. Americans, on average, spend over 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime. And if you hate the work that you do, if it triggers anxiety and depletes your energy, that is a lot of time spent being miserable.
On the contrary, if you are in a role or working for yourself and able to spend 80% to 90% of the time doing work that fuels you up, that makes you feel alive and energized, and allows you to access a state of flow regularly, that’s a lot of time feeling happy. And that happiness will translate to other areas of your life—just like studies have shown we’re not as good at multitasking as we like to think we are, scientific research confirms that how we feel about our work-life directly translates into how we show up and experience our personal lives too.
So how can you create a professional life you truly love?
Use this Simple 3-Step Process to Show Your Professional Life (and yourself!) a little more love.
1. Build Awareness
Notice how you feel about different kinds of professional tasks and projects. Which ones are you excited to take on? Which ones do you dread? When do you feel like you’re in your flow at work, and when do you feel like you’re pulling teeth or procrastinating?
What about the environment you work in and the people you work with? Which coworkers do you enjoy partnering with? Which ones make you feel exhausted after a single conversation? Do you enjoy working in a room full of people and conversation, or do you prefer a quieter space?
Write your observations in a notebook, keep track of them with an app on your phone, or use my free Clarity Guide (you can download it here!).
2. Analyze Your Findings
Take a few minutes every evening, and then once a week, to read through your observations and draw conclusions from this new data you’ve collected about yourself and your work.
What is it about that coworker you find so annoying or challenging to be around? Why are you procrastinating starting that project? Is it because you’re scared you don’t have enough experience to do it well, or is it because you love doing research-based work and this project means you have to spend hours talking to people?
Your goal in this step is simply to analyze the data so you can begin to make more space for the professional tasks and projects that energize you and let go of the ones that don’t. Don’t judge why you feel the way that you do, or why you enjoy one type of work over another. Just keep asking why.
3. Take Action
Now that you have more clarity around what energizes you and what deletes you professionally, you can begin to take action.
Write down one thing you can do right now, today, to love your professional life a little bit more?
It could be as simple as cutting off that one coworker who always has something negative to say. Or closing your computer and logging off at exactly 5 pm so you can take a walk or make your Zoom workout class live.
Small changes over time lead to big results, so instead of focusing on all the things you can’t change right now, commit to making one small change every day for a week. Then notice how you feel at the end of that week.
My FREE Clarity Guide will walk you through how to track your energy and show you how to use your finding st to create a Clarity Chart, your personalized cheat sheet for knowing when to say “yes” or “no” to a specific opportunity.