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.

The Way We Use Mindfulness Matters

By Annabelle Parr

It seems like mindfulness is everywhere these days. In recent years, it has exploded on the scene as the seemingly catch-all cure for a whole host of problems, supposedly promising to address mental health concerns, decrease stress, improve performance at work, and make you a better parent. Its benefits are touted across the internet – from business sites like Forbes and Fast Company, to wellness sites like the Huffington Post, to inspirational sites like Upworthy.

It’s true that practicing mindfulness can benefit us in all sorts of ways, showing not only benefits to our mind and our mood, but to our overall physiological health as well. However, when something is subjected to as much hype as mindfulness has been, sometimes in all the air time, it can get watered down and potentially misrepresented. Depending on how we talk about mindfulness and how we choose to apply it to our struggles and our lives, mindfulness can be a huge help or it can become one more well-disguised attempt at avoiding and controlling discomfort.

So what actually is mindfulness?

Mindfulness has a long and rich history rooted in Eastern philosophy traditions, which have acknowledged its benefits for centuries. Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, was a trail blazer in integrating an understanding of mindfulness into the Western conception of health. He defines mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Meditation is an example of a mindful exercise, but mindfulness can be practiced in any moment during any activity – one of the reasons it is so appealing and accessible as a means of promoting wellbeing.

Sounds ideal, right? You can practice it anytime, anywhere! The key to a stress free life is available to you in any moment! Well…not exactly.

 As Steven C. Hayes (2019) pointed out in his new book, A Liberated Mind, “it matters what mindfulness is for.” Why are we choosing to practice mindfulness? Based on any number of headlines and articles you read online, it sounds like practicing mindfulness is about getting rid of discomfort and stress. But thinking about it this way can actually make things worse! As Carl Jung noted, what we resist persists. The more we try to escape, avoid, or control our emotions, the stronger they tend to get. What’s more, when all our energy is devoted to controlling discomfort, our lives become increasingly restricted as our choices are dictated by what we are not willing to feel. When mindfulness becomes one more tool to escape or control uncomfortable experiences, it can end up fueling the same cycle that gets us caught in suffering.

So if it’s not about getting rid of stress, why should we bother being mindful?

From an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) perspective, mindfulness helps make our lives richer and more meaningful. It does not guarantee freedom from discomfort. But it does offer us a new way to meet our pain. When we connect to the here and now rather than getting caught in regrets about the past or worries about the future, we are freed to notice what is happening in the moment and then choose to take action toward what is important to us.

The purpose is not to get rid of stress or anxiety or grief or whatever other uncomfortable feeling shows up, but rather to help facilitate awareness so that discomfort does not control our actions and define our lives. In being more present, we are free to notice not only the tough stuff like sadness or fear or frustration, but also the stuff that fills us up, like peace, joy and triumph. When we are not responsible for changing how we feel, we are freed up to change how we behave.

If you are interested in learning more about mindfulness, it can absolutely be helpful! And it can help you with things like stress and anxiety and work performance and being a more engaged parent and partner. But the reason it is helpful matters. A lot.

When you decide to show up to the moment mindfully, remind yourself that this is not a way to escape something difficult or painful. As psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl, so poignantly noted, “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” Mindfulness allows us to access that space. It allows us to hold our experience willingly and gently, allows us to notice helpful information that may be present in our experience, and allows us to make a conscious, active choice about how we want to behave. We are freed to choose to act in a way that is consistent with our values, and in so doing, we are invited to experience life as full of vitality and meaning, even when we are faced with discomfort.

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.