Strategies for a Better Work Experience: Examine Your Underlying Beliefs About Work

Aim & Conquer Strategic Insights for a Better Work Experience

This is Part 1 in the Aim & Conquer series "Strategies for a Better Work Experience."

What do you believe about work? Most people have a wide variety of ideas in relation to different aspects of their work. These ideas could include what types of jobs are better than others ... what it means for someone to be of a certain title ... how colleagues should interact with each other ... how time should be allocated to various activities ... what level of each emotion is acceptable to reveal in different situations ... and so on.

These ideas serve as the framework through which you interact with your work. When the reality of the experience outside of you matches the preferences you’ve set inside of you, everything feels great. In the broad dimension of “work,” life starts coming into alignment with how you desire it to be.

However, when the reality of the experience outside of you does not match your preferences, internal friction is born. You want things to go other than the way they’re going. The depth and intensity of that sentiment can grow on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a yearly basis, and over increasingly long cycles. In many cases, it can lead to a “relationship” with work that is viewed as being “less than what it could be.”

All of this is driven by underlying beliefs. Without regular examination of the framework through which you are choosing to view your work, you can unknowingly become settled, or fixed, on a set of ideas that, at minimum, limits the joy and meaning you feel, and, at maximum, negatively impacts your experience on a consistent basis.

So ... what do you believe? And what effects are those beliefs having?

Some beliefs might be supportive to your levels of motivation, enthusiasm, ease, collaboration, creativity, and excellence. Other beliefs might be secretly sabotaging you in relation to those exact same areas. The more clarity you gain on what you are choosing to believe and on what impact those choices are having, the more you can empower yourself to consciously design the framework through which you interact with work in order to achieve the results you desire.

In the rest of this post, Aim & Conquer offers three strategies to support you in examining your underlying beliefs about work:

Broaden Your Definition
Accumulate a Supportive Story
Practice Purposefully and Regularly

Enjoy!

Broaden Your Definition

For most people, “work” is just one part within the entirety of their life. They invest a certain amount of hours ... earn a certain amount of money ... progress to a certain title ... and take responsibility for the success of a certain scope of activity.

Often, the time spent “outside” of work is viewed as being more precious than the time spent working. The time spent working is seen, to some degree, as a constraint, one that has an impact on the overall quality of experience. When the topic “work/life balance” is discussed, it is as if work is separate from life, and as if some sort of calculation is required to determine the optimal ratio by which time should be allocated to these "distinct" dimensions.

Examination can be helpful in these areas. Is work separate from life? What qualifies as “work”?

There is a perspective under which one could say that people never actually stop "working," or that life never stops working in them. In this example, “work” is defined more broadly. Even when you are sitting on the couch, you are, to some degree, active as a body, a mind, and a spirit, existing altogether in a state of aliveness.

If “work” is defined in this broader scope, it encompasses a lot more than “40 hours a week.” In some ways, it can represent one's contributions, both to oneself and to life as a whole.

How well are you working? What are you working towards? What stable principles can guide you in this more general sense of work, such that you can follow them whether it’s Monday or Saturday, whether you’re at the office or in your home?

The more you notice the degree to which work permeates your life, the larger the set of moments you can optimize yourself around, and the greater ease you can find, regardless of whether you are engaged in your “9-to-5" or not. At a high level, you can become familiar with the parts within you that are always working ... and take leadership of them in a way that flows seamlessly into the execution of your activities in the external world.

Take some time to examine how you are defining work, and how that definition is setting up the generation of various thoughts and emotions within you. Can you find some way to work ... or something to work at ... that allows you to take greater control of the experience you are having?

Accumulate a Supportive Story

As you live, you pick up words about yourself. Those words can be quality traits ... demographic descriptors ... positive or negative judgments ... and much more. The words can also be strung together, in combination, to tell stories about the past, present, or future versions of reality, as described by you. All of this exists inside you, as part of your framework for interacting with life.

As it pertains to work specifically, what words have you picked up?

What were you taught about “work” from those close to you growing up? What did you learn through your experiences in school and extracurricular activities? Why have you made certain career choices? When others ask you to describe yourself in a work context, what do you say?

These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself to start shining a brighter light on the words and stories you have decided to reference when it comes to your relationship with work.

To varying degrees, people become attached to these words and stories. They might even start to see them as unassailable “facts” rather than as interpretations that, with some imagination, could have been understood in entirely different ways.

Any experience of life is so enormous, with so many influencing factors, that no sequence of letters can possibly encapsulate the totality of “what happened” or “what it meant.” This perspective provides people with tremendous freedom in choosing the lens with which they want to describe, and draw conclusions from, particular events in their past.

A boiled-down example is that of “glass half full” vs. “glass half empty.” This concept is applicable in perhaps every imaginable dimension. There is always another way of interpreting the reality that is being experienced.

At this point, some might say, “Yes, I can understand the logic of this, but some things are certain. They just are what they are, and to try to make them into anything else would be a deliberate contortion of reality.” The question is ... how do you know for sure? And, importantly, what effects is that particular interpretation having on the future version of you?

Aim & Conquer is interested in supporting you to transform your experience of work into one that is more energizing, more meaningful, and more joyful. The words and stories you have accumulated about yourself and about work influence how you interpret whatever you encounter while working, and you have the ability to select, refer back to, and spread whichever words and stories you desire. If the way you’re feeling on a daily basis is not what you want to feel, it can be beneficial to let go of the interpretations that are not serving you and to empower yourself to take a more active role in authoring a story that inspires you.

Practice Purposefully and Regularly

Workdays can be long. In the same way that a car can start to drift if the driver’s hands aren’t on the wheel and making constant adjustments, your internal state can evolve without supervision. By the time you reach the end of the day and take stock of what has happened, it’s possible for you to realize that you’ve spent a majority of your time experiencing feelings that are “less” than what you would like to feel “in an ideal world.”

Most people would generally acknowledge that they have the ability to play an active role in influencing what’s going on inside of them, but doing so on a consistent basis can be a significant challenge. It takes discipline to structure your day in a way that promotes and sustains a high level of aliveness.

This has become especially true post-pandemic, when the lines between home and work have blurred, when the “lounging” energy of being at home has gained traction. There is no question that this has offered people greater flexibility and freedom, a beneficial development. However, it has also placed a higher burden on workers to take responsibility for managing their energy.

While working, it can be easy to focus on what needs to get done at the expense of your internal state while you are doing it. Said another way ... what you are “doing” can take priority over how you are “being.” Any time there is too much or too little time pressure to complete a deliverable, it’s possible for you to become disconnected from what you are experiencing on the inside. When you eventually check back in, what you find might be exhaustion or boredom, frustration or tension, or some other sentiment that you’d prefer not to have.

There are few, if any, jobs that will set you up for a naturally joyful day without requiring any effort on your part to rejuvenate yourself. The more you can train yourself to regularly examine your present status and to purposefully schedule time for activities that help you recharge, the better chance you’ll have of maintaining an internal environment that vibrates with aliveness at a high level.

Ask yourself ... with what level of energy do you start your workdays? How do your activities after waking up influence that state? How often do you give yourself room to examine “where you are” during the day? What proactive steps do you take to give yourself a boost?

Any machine that produces output must be inspected, repaired, and maintained on a recurring basis. You, as a being, are no different. The difficulty often lies in applying this understanding. It can feel like the workday is already burdened, and taking on the additional duty of lifting your spirits can seem mentally heavy.

It doesn’t have to be. Ultimately, what you are aiming for is to bring more lightness and “zing” to your work experience, if that is something that you desire. The only way to increase your skill in generating these types of feelings more frequently is to make it a daily practice and to progressively realize the power you’ve been granted to proactively direct your experience of work.