If you’re currently working a job that you hate then you are already well aware of the harmful impact that your negative workplace experience is having on your life. We spend most of our days working in and around our jobs so it’s not rocket science to understand that when most of our day is not enjoyable, most of our life is also miserable.
Actually, it really is worse than simply saying “most of our life” because when our job makes us miserable our unhappiness spills over into all areas of our personal life. It is simply impossible to be extremely unhappy from 9 to 5 and extremely happy outside of those hours. The reason why this is true is the exact same reason why job hopping is not the solution to finding workplace happiness, and that is because it doesn’t exist.
There is no such thing as ‘workplace happiness’.
When you head off to work there is no happiness clock-in machine, there are no happiness vials in the lunch room, your desk isn’t coated with a happiness varnish, and your boss doesn’t wave a happiness wand. You can rummage through your desk, your colleagues’ desks, or through all of the operating manuals that your workplace offers, but you’ll come up empty handed if you’re searching for workplace happiness because the harsh truth is happiness isn’t in your workplace.
The only place happiness exists is within YOU.
Can you remember how elated you felt when you first heard the news that you had won your current job? Everyone feels ecstatic when they hear they have made it through the interview process and succeeded in winning the job. But, of course, it’s not the job itself that made you happy, you hadn’t even started it yet; it’s the various associations you had to the job that made you feel great about it. Those associations were the many benefits that, inside your own mind, you believed the job would bring you.
Your happiness at securing this job meant good things to you, such as a chance for you to do a certain thing, to earn a certain amount of money, to become more successful, to save up for a certain thing, to get out of debt, to meet new people, to improve yourself and so on.
You see, in the beginning, it wasn’t your job that made you happy; it was your view about it. Your perceptions about the various things that the job meant to you were what made you happy. It was how you were thinking about it that made you feel good. The happiness you experienced as a result of winning the job didn’t come from the workplace or from the job itself, it came from within you.
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Thanks for the positive reinforcement. I have to try to make my life happy rather then expecting other people to do it for me. I wish you all inner peace and happiness.