St. Louis Business Journal
Joy in work

By Anna Navarro

September 1999 - "Joy in work — are you kidding?" For many people these two concepts just don't go together.

Yet I know that "joy" and "work" do go together. I experience it every day in my own work. And for seventeen years, I've been helping other people make the integration of these two concepts possible in their lives.

The first step in attaining joy in work is to ask: "What do I enjoy doing?" On the surface, that may seem like an easy question to answer. But for many people, it's not.

When I ask clients what kind of activities they enjoy, their first response is often to list their accomplishments. But sometimes when I press, I learn that they are confusing pride in what they pulled off, or relief at having met a goal, with true enjoyment.

True enjoyment produces a sense of absorption or loosing track of time, of being caught up in what we are doing. It's a minute to minute experience of satisfaction that comes from the activity itself. It is largely independent of the outcome or result. It is a sense of flowing with what you are doing, and enjoying it for its own sake.

A recent example, told with permission of the person involved, may help illustrate:

My client was a very successful sales professional who earned in the multiple six figures. He sold an intangible product, and was only really happy with his work in those all too fleeting moments when he tallied up his sales figures and got his paycheck. But the glory and pleasure of attaining each month's goals was almost immediately replaced by the need to engage in numerous activities he did not enjoy in order to meet the next month's goals. Calling on customers and building relationships was not this man's idea of a satisfying activity, but it is how he spent most of his time.

When we first talked about what he enjoyed, he responded that he liked meeting his sales goals. But as I probed, I found that he didn't at all enjoy what it took to meet those goals. He was frustrated and unhappy most of the time.

To find work satisfaction, this unhappy sales person needed to discover activities that he intrinsically enjoyed, and build a career around them.

Why are many of us so out of touch with what we enjoy? Because it lies buried below many layers of what we "should" do, like achieving goals or pleasing others (spouses, parents, bosses, etc.)

It's not that achieving goals or pleasing others is a bad thing to do. Far from it. But focusing on them to the exclusion of our own minute-to-minute satisfaction with work leads to much misery.

Sometimes the difficulty in getting people to focus on what they enjoy comes from the unconscious fear that if they do so, they will not earn a high income or receive much recognition. But I generally find the reverse to be true. Once people discover what they enjoy doing, and figure out how to build a career around it, they tend to be not only happy, but successful as well.

A word of warning: when identifying experiences we enjoy in order to discover clues for a happy career, it's important to focus on activities that are task-oriented. Sitting on a beach may be very satisfying, but it's unlikely to yield a lot of clues about the kind of tasks a person may enjoy in work.

The unhappy salesperson I just described got a sense of satisfaction, a sense of "flow in the doing" from building a deck on his back yard. As a kid, he also got a kick of helping his father repair the family car. When he visited his customers' businesses, he spent more time than necessary visiting manufacturing operations, because they fascinated him.

Gradually as we worked he began to realize that his real joy came from making things, and that he had a knack for technical and mechanical activities.

As a result of our work, he started up a small manufacturing company. Today he is happy and successful.

The key to this turnaround for him came from finally realizing what he enjoyed doing minute to minute.

Finding joy in work is not always an easy thing to do, but since most of us spend more time working than in any other waking activity, there is a high payoff for this job of internal sleuthing.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.