How To Bring Meaning to Your Work Even When It’s Not Your Passion

Connect with your values and you can find meaning in any moment

by Annabelle Parr

“Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.”

Pretty good advice, right? Of course this expression doesn’t mean that you will literally never work a day in your life. Rather it implies that when you love your work, it feels like a choice more than a burden. On the whole, it adds value and meaning to your life, and fills your soul rather than saps it of vitality. To love one’s work is a beautiful thing that should absolutely be encouraged.

However, there are several important caveats to note when we discuss the importance of “loving your work.”

First of all, even if you love your job with all your heart, there will inevitably be hard days. Something about the saying above implies a sense of joy, ease, and effortlessness. Like if you love your job enough, you’ll hit some kind of work nirvana and just be blissed out all the time. But there will be days when – despite your love and passion for what you do – you are less than thrilled when your alarm goes off. There will likely be parts of your job that you love a bit less than others. There may be people you butt heads with. And there will be days that are downright crappy. No matter what your job or how much you love it, you will have hard days.

Work is work and it will still be challenging even when you love it.

When we set people up to expect that loving your work means you get to avoid difficult emotions and experiences, we do them a disservice. In fact, if you are looking for something perfect that involves 0% discomfort, it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will fail to notice something that you could or would love. No job is perfect; instead, look for the one that means enough to you that you are willing to suffer some discomfort for it because it is just that important to you. So, caveat number one: love does not imply perfection. However, it does imply purpose and meaning (more on that later).

Caveat number two: there is a certain amount of privilege inherent in prioritizing loving your job.

Loving your job is a wonderful goal, but not everyone is afforded the resources and opportunities necessary to attain their “dream job.” Figuring out what you love to do can take a lot of time, energy, and effort that many people do not have. Ultimately, work is a means to paying the bills – it is first and foremost about survival. When survival is on the line and basic needs are barely being met, loving your work is not high on the priority list because it often can’t be. So what about all those people who for one reason or another, are not able to put “love” as a top priority when it comes to their job?

Well, what does it actually mean to love your work?

I imagine that if you truly love your job, if you won the lottery tomorrow, you would choose to continue to work just for the love of the thing. So what if you don’t love your work? If you have the means to try to figure out what it is you do love and to seek that out, go for it! But if you don’t, you might still be able to find love in the midst of work even when the job is just a means to an end.

What if you don’t actually have to love the work that you do to find meaning in it?

What if the meaning isn’t necessarily in the job title or the day to day tasks, but actually in the way that you do it and the reasons you do it for? From an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) perspective, life inevitably involves pain and discomfort. The problem isn’t pain, but rather the inflexible ways in which we choose to respond to it. We get stuck in our minds, in stories about how things are or how they should be; we get stuck trying to escape discomfort, but find only that our lives get progressively smaller and more rigid.

The antidote to suffering: psychological flexibility.

That is, being willing to have our experiences inside our skin (thoughts, emotions, sensations); choosing to be present in this moment; recognizing our thoughts for what they are: words generated by our minds rather than inherent truths about the way things are; choosing to see our selves as more complex than our current experience; and identifying what matters to us and deciding to act in the direction of what matters even when we are experiencing discomfort. In ACT, our personally chosen values serve as the compass for our actions in any given moment. And our values are qualities of being that we can bring to any experience at any time.

From an ACT perspective, love might have less to do with the work itself, and more to do with the qualities of being that you bring to it.

There is something about the idea of loving your work that seems somewhat fixed and rigid. Like you either love it or you don’t and that’s that. But when you choose to allow your values to inform your work, you have some sense of agency day to day regarding whether you will find meaning in this moment.

What are your personal values?

Maybe it’s important to you to provide for your family. Maybe it’s important to you to be kind and compassionate, or driven and tenacious, or present and engaged. These are all qualities of being that you can choose to bring to any job, on any given day. When we reconnect with our values – who and how we want to be – we can infuse our day with meaning no matter what we are doing.

Here’s a new saying for you: connect with your values and you can find meaning in any moment.

I think it’s meaning that we’re really after when we encourage people to do what they love. And it’s freeing to know that meaning is up to you. You do not have to find the elusive dream job before you can find meaning in your work. No matter the contextual restrictions on your ability to choose a job you “love,” you can still decide who you want to be when you show up every day to do your job, regardless of what it is.

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF STRUGGLING, FEELING STUCK, AND/OR COULD USE SOME HELP NAVIGATING YOUR FEELINGS, YOU COULD BENEFIT FROM COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY, ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY, AND MINDFULNESS. DR. SHOSHANA SHEA CAN HELP. SHE CAN BE CONTACTED AT 619-269-2377.

Work-Life Balance: On Connecting with Our Values

By Annabelle Parr 

As technology has expanded in the last couple of decades, the workplace has changed significantly. With laptops and smartphones, work can follow you outside of the office and into the hours outside of 9 to 5. While the upside of this shift is that there is now more opportunity for flexibility, the downside is that it can mean pressure to work non-stop. No place is sacred when the smartphone can ping you with an email anytime, anywhere. As a result of both the increased opportunity for flexibility and the increased opportunity for being forever on the clock, work life balance is tricky. How can we create balance between work and other important areas of our lives, like family, fitness, fun, etc.?

When work life balance becomes oppressive…

Though this question is certainly valuable and worth considering, the emphasis on work life balance also has the potential to become oppressive. Are you balanced enough? Have you created the perfect balance between working and spending time with your kids and your partner? Are you doing it all with a smile?

When we fuse with this ideal of work life balance – in other words, when we hold as a literal truth that we must equally balance our time between our work lives and the other aspects of our lives – we can lose sight of the original point behind the concept. We may find ourselves feeling increasingly stretched too thin. Rather than enjoying our so-called balanced lives, we may find ourselves feeling persistently inadequate, unsatisfied, and that we are failing in some regard.

Values-based living offers an alternative approach

So what can we do instead? We can construct our own personal definition of what it means to have a fulfilling, balanced life. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) suggests that when we connect with our own personally chosen, deeply held values (rather than values imposed upon us, designed to please culture/other people, or driven by a “should”), we construct a compass which guides our decisions. Values are not the same as goals or outcomes, but are qualities of being, toward which we can strive in each moment. When we are conscious of and connected to our values, we are equipped with a why to drive our actions. 

And once we know what matters to us, we can begin to prioritize the things that truly bring us meaning and fulfillment. We can gauge whether our lives are aligned with our values or out of sync, regardless of whether they live up to the ‘work life balance’ ideal. Then we can consider what (if anything) needs to change in order to better align with what’s really important to us. The beauty of this idea is that there is no one right way to structure our lives. To the extent that you have choices about your work and your time spent outside it, you get to decide what matters to you and what actions you can take in that direction.

How do we connect with our values?

There are a whole host of ways that we can get in touch with our values. ACT relies on experiential exercises and metaphors to teach psychological flexibility skills and to help us connect with what matters.

One exercise that can help you consider what is truly important to you is to try writing a summary of your own autobiography written twenty years from now. What’s the title? How do you hope to be described? What major accomplishments or milestones are noted? What stands out about you in your life story? 

If you’d like to try a similar exercise, imagine what you would want people to say about you in your eulogy. This exercise may sound morbid, but in connecting with the finitude of life, we can reflect on how we want to move forward with our lives and how we want to engage with the present, rather than reflecting back with regret. How do you hope you will be described by the people that matter to you most at the end of your life? How do you want to be remembered? What do you hope you will have accomplished? How do you hope to have spent your time? Who do you hope to be?

If this activity feels too morbid for you, before you decide not to complete it, be present with and honor the feelings that show up when you consider the exercise. Those feelings may have something important to say… 

Once you have done one (or both) of these activities, see what themes emerge. What matters to you? Who and how do you want to be? How do you want to spend your time? What do you want to bring to the world? You may notice some goals you have for your life, but see if you can step back from the goals and identify the qualities of being that you want to embody. These are your personal values. Now, consider how you can apply them to your life today. In what ways is your life consistent with or at odds with your eulogy or your autobiography? These are the areas in which you may want to consider making values-based changes.

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF STRUGGLING, FEELING STUCK, AND/OR COULD USE SOME HELP NAVIGATING YOUR FEELINGS, YOU COULD BENEFIT FROM COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY, ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY, AND MINDFULNESS. DR. SHOSHANA SHEA CAN HELP. SHE CAN BE CONTACTED AT 619-269-2377.