Business Without the Bullsh*t: 49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know (29 page)

Many people hate their jobs. However, while it is
common
for people to hate their jobs, it is not
normal
. This is an important distinction. If you believe that it’s normal to hate your job, then you’ll believe people who don’t hate their jobs are
abnormal
.

In reality, some people love their jobs passionately, some hate their jobs passionately, but the majority are shades of indifferent. The process below gets you to this point of indifference (at least), thereby laying the groundwork for finding a job that better suits you:

You’re probably certain you’ve got great reasons for hating your job: your boss, your coworkers, your customers, your staff, the repetitiveness, the unpredictability, the long hours, the low pay, whatever.

Those things may be very real challenges, but before you can change them, you’ve got to get at the core problem, which is the fact that you’ve let your feelings about your work degenerate into hate, or something that resembles it.

Some people believe that hating a job can be the motivation to get a new one. Maybe so, but there are two problems with this theory:

First, hatred is debilitating rather than motivating. Hating consumes
mental and emotional energy that could be better spent finding a job that suits you better. That’s why so many people who hate their jobs never seem to do anything about it.

Second, hating your current job makes it more likely that, if you leave, you’ll end up in a job that you hate just as much, because when you leave, you’ll be taking your emotions with you. As you interview for another job, your hate (and consequent desperation) will cling to you, and your potential future employer will probably sense that something is off.

For example, I have a friend who over a decade had a series of jobs that he hated because (as he put it) “everyone I work for turns out to be a jerk.” However, since those jobs were in different industries, what all the jobs had in common was… him.

His anger at his bosses became a self-fulfilling prophesy. When interviewing, he was unable to hide the fact that he blamed his former bosses for his failures. As a result, the only people who’d hire him were lousy bosses who were accustomed to being hated.

The core problem, then, is not your job or your boss or your coworkers, but your emotional reaction to them. You may very well be working in a crummy job, but that’s an even better reason to get your emotions under control so you can more easily find something better.

Many people believe that they experience emotions and then, in order to describe those emotions, select the words that seem the most descriptive. That’s true as far as it goes, but there’s more to the equation.

Because your mind associates certain words with certain emotions, your words have power to create those emotions as well as describe them. The word
hate
is particularly intense, so the more frequently you think, “I hate my job,” the more hatred you create.

Therefore, your first step in getting out of the state of hatred is to select other, less intense words to describe your experience. Here are a few to choose from:

Whenever you hear yourself saying (either to yourself or others) that you “hate” your job, force yourself to substitute the weaker, less intense words. Similarly, suppose you “hate your boss.” Rather than fill yourself up with a toxic emotion, weaken it by using phrases that create a more neutral reaction, like these:

De-intensifying the vocabulary that you use to describe your situation doesn’t change your situation, of course, but it does keep you from making the experience even worse by over-dramatizing it.

There’s no question that some jobs are truly horrible. However, unless you’re in a truly exceptional situation, there are
some
parts of your job that you can manage to like and enjoy. Fortunately, now that you’ve stopped hypnotizing yourself with hatred, you’ll be free to notice them.

List them out, regardless of how small they seem. See how many you can come up with. Make a game out of it, a challenge. Even seemingly trivial stuff is worth listing. Here are some ideas to get you started: