Unfortunately, your boss is not going to come to save you, says executive coach Alisa Cohn.
4 strategies to take control of your experience at work
If you feel like you have a dysfunctional bond with one of your most important relationships—your relationship with your job—you are not alone. According to a recent Global HP survey, only 27% of knowledge workers say they have a healthy relationship with work.
Sadly, it appears that nobody is coming to save workers. Your boss, who very well may care about your experience, likely doesn’t have the skills, power, or time to help you. Eight in 10 managers have no formal training, according to a study conducted by The Chartered Management Institute. And managers also struggle with their own challenging experience with the workplace.
Like it or not, if you want to find success, fulfillment, and happiness at work, you’re going to have to help you help yourself. It’s going to have to be an inside job.
As an executive coach with more than 20 years of experience, here are four strategies that I have found can help workers take control of their experience at work.
IDENTIFY THE SOURCE OF YOUR DISCOMFORT
You don’t have control over what others do. However, you do have full control over what you do. If you are unhappy with your job, this is a good moment to lean into this lesson.
Start with self-awareness. Some good questions to journal with are: What’s really going on? What do I wish was different? What is making me feel so dissatisfied? What would it take to make me happy?
If you self-reflect regularly, you can better understand what’s going on inside of you. And then possibly find a key to fix it. For example, one client of mine complained that his boss never helped him. After I asked him to keep a journal about what was upsetting him, he realized that he kept saying “yes” to tasks other people gave him. When I asked him why, he told me that he assumed it was the right thing to do. But I pointed out it was making him miserable.
He began experimenting with saying “no” to requests. His teammates accepted his answer and—miraculously—found a way to complete their work on their own.
My client began to see he was more in control than he realized. It didn’t change his manager, who was still not particularly helpful, but it did change his experience and mindset, helping him feel more empowered and less unhappy.
STOP RUMINATING
Your journaling practice may uncover another uncomfortable truth: you’re obsessing too much about your job.
When you ruminate about your job—especially when you’re away from it—you can fall into a downward spiral. It’s one thing to get annoyed when something bad happens at work. It’s another to think about it later, spinning yourself up all over again. You don’t get the recovery time away from work that you need, and you also build up an extra layer of aggravation.
To stop yourself from obsessing, psychologist Guy Winch suggests you track how much time you think about work, especially when you’re away from it. One of my clients, a marketing executive, was shocked to find that she spent about six hours per weekend thinking about work as she was carpooling her kids to their various activities. She’d thought her exhaustion from the weekend was because of all the soccer she drove her kids to, but it turned out her inner fantasies about what she should have said in meetings, and her frustrations with her coworkers, were what was sapping her energy.
Once you’ve identified when you perseverate, find something else to turn your attention to. My client decided to make a much bigger effort to find topics to discuss with her children and their friends while driving them—rather than leave them to their own conversations and devices. She enjoyed these chats and got to know her kids better. She also created an energizing playlist for when she was alone in the car. Belting out Broadway tunes was the perfect antidote to obsessing over what her toxic colleague might have meant by his recent missive.
Distracting yourself from unproductive worry can go a long way towards putting your work life in its proper perspective.
FIND INSPIRATION IN YOUR COWORKERS
Now that you’ve freed up your energy by cutting down on dark thoughts, you can use that energy to spend time with the people in your organization who light you up and who seem to be moving forward rapidly in their own careers.
Every company has at least a few people who radiate positive energy. Make it your mission to seek them out and soak up some lessons from them.
One of my clients, Karen, who worked inside a consumer goods company realized that every time she ran into one of her colleagues, Kevin, she left feeling more optimistic and energized. She had coffee with Kevin and asked him what his secret was.
Kevin reminded Karen that he used to be in the FBI and had found himself in rough moments regularly. Now he was in a cushy office job. A good day for me is a day when I am safe and I can make a little progress, he told her. Karen adopted that positive attitude herself.
Karen also closely observed her coworkers who got the plum assignments. They seemed to have great rapport with senior leaders and understood what was on their minds. Karen began to proactively ask for meetings with some executives she didn’t know well and made an effort to walk over to them when she ran into them. She showed a personal interest in them and they reciprocated. One day, out of the blue, one of the executives called her and offered her a very interesting month-long project in Hong Kong, telling her “You mentioned you were interested in international travel.”
Notice what your switched-on colleagues do at work and see if it helps give you a new perspective.
CHALLENGE YOURSELF
When you’re feeling blah at work, the last thing you might want to do is put more effort in. You’re barely getting through the day and you may feel like you have nothing left to give. But think again.
You might feel bored at work because it’s boring and it holds no challenge for you. According to the Yerkes–Dodson law, when stress is too low, performance suffers.
However, if you add a small amount of stress, your performance will increase and you’ll get more interested.
You don’t have to stress yourself out by bungee jumping, just set a tight deadline for yourself and see if you can accomplish it. Find a specific skill you can develop that you know will be challenging. These will increase your stress in a healthy way, which can make you more alert and focused and less lethargic.
Setting tasks like this will also give you wins, which activates the Progress Principle, a phenomenon identified by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. They found that achieving small wins was the best way to ignite more engaged work and more creativity.
Of course, it would be nice if your manager was skilled enough to guide you and coach you. But most often it’s up to you to ensure that you take the situation you have and proactively develop the tools to flourish.