8 Thoughts to keep your job fresh and exciting

5 minute read

A job, career, or a business can sometimes feel like a struggling romance. In the beginning, it’s all love, possibility, and adventure. But then over time, that volcanic love you had at first begins to cool. That job that you once fantasized about, has gotten a little older, more familiar, habitual, and routine. You begin to see that your chosen path wasn’t exactly how you imagined it would be; there is a lot less excitement than you expected; there is a lot more work and compromise involved; some of the bosses are good, but statistically, more of them are bad; some days are good, and some days are bad — really bad — so bad in fact, that you feel like you don’t want to do this anymore. I have felt this way many times throughout my own career. So what do we do when we feel like we’ve hit a wall in our job?

The unfortunate thing is, when jobs don’t seem to be going well, too often people just quit, thinking that will solve all their problems. In today’s climate, it is estimated that the average person could change jobs once every 12 months. But like divorce, the cost of job change can be expensive, both on the individual, and especially on the organizations they leave in their wake. Changing jobs doesn’t always solve our problems though. It may provide a temporary change or distraction, but oftentimes we carry our problems with us. Admittedly, I am an advocate for longer term tenures at a given job. So how do we navigate our job to keep it vibrant, growing, and exciting – for better or worse? In other words, how do we fall in love with our job again? What follows is a list of eight thoughts and suggestions that have been helpful to me over the years.

• Recommit – Life is all about decision, action, and forward motion, but sometimes we get off course. Recommitting reminds us that we are people of character, and people of character don’t just quit because they have a bad day, week, or month. When we recommit, we re-engage and get back on course.
• Go back to the beginning – Recall what made you excited about this job in the first place, reconnect with those things or with those people. Behave like you did in the beginning, revisit and restore some of those early connections and habits when you first started.
• Know there are ebbs, flows, and plateaus – Life is not a endless parade of entertainment, achievement, and peak experiences. An ideal life certainly has peaks, but it also has times of lower order activity, rest, and recovery, which is why we have sleep – our bodies need it. The key is to know where you are in that energy cycle. There are times when you achieve, but there are times when you hit a plateau, and you are just doing the work. And there are times when that work isn’t glamorous, in fact, those times can be boring and tedious. But sometimes we need to “man-up” and press forward, because they are often the things that lead to the height of achievement.

• Change it up – Sometimes we hit a point where we can’t do any more in our current role, and in those moments, we need to find something of variety in our job. That may include taking on a new initiative or a new responsibility. It may include going beyond our role to find ways to make our organization a little better, faster, operate at lower cost, with less risk, or with higher quality – or maybe we need to be the one to make our team environment more fun for everyone. You may need a change of scenery, working in a different space, supporting a different customer, supporting a different function, or solving a different problem altogether. You may even consider becoming the boss.
• Invest in ourselves – Sometimes we need to invest in our own professional development by reading some new books, going to industry conferences and workshops, pursuing certifications, or growing our existing skill-set in a meaningful way. All too often our careers get stale, because we have gotten stale, and stopped growing.

• Go out again – Nothing adds greater variety than adding to your list of contacts. Expanding your connections within your organization, in other companies, and in your industry gives you insight into the way other organizations work, and broadens your context. If the time comes that you do need a change, you will have more people to draw from.
• The grass isn’t always greener – Often we are tempted to think that if we quit, then everything will get better. The problem is, you bring yourself wherever you are, and all your problems with you. Changing jobs doesn’t always solve your problems, you have to do that by changing yourself and your perspective. Besides if you quit, you have to learn a whole new organization, you have to re-establish your network there, and you have to re-establish all the context you lost in the move. You never know, by leaving, you might just be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. In other words, leaving your job can also have some unintended consequences.

I once knew a gentleman that worked in a niche function, but changed jobs every 6-8 months. He would get into a job, but no sooner than he was in the job, he would start looking elsewhere. It got to a point where his “bouncing around” became so well known by both colleagues and employers in his industry that eventually no one would hire him.

• Look for the good – Gratitude is a simple but profound choice. And that choice is always within our power. When we take a step back, take stock of how blessed we really are to have this job, career, or business; to have that paycheck, customers who value us, benefits, colleagues to grow with, and a purpose that wakes us up every day – we may find that we are luckier than we think.

To be sure, there are job, career, or business situations that are irreparable, toxic, or operate unethically. In those types of situations, sometimes we have no choice but to leave.

However, if the situation is positive overall, but has become routine and boring, and has some occasional bad days (by the way, all jobs have occasional bad days) leaving doesn’t solve it for us long term. Ultimately, the answer is — WE have to change. We have to take responsibility for our own rut, after all we allowed ourselves to get into it. We have to change the way we think, gain a healthier perspective, recapture our gratitude, alter the way we speak about our work to ourselves and others, and transform our daily habits to align with the needs of our growth. To maintain passion for our jobs, careers, and businesses, we have to evolve as the environment evolves, and stay ahead of our own boredom. We need to become better than we are, and approach our jobs, careers, businesses differently than we did before – otherwise that plateau may become a slippery slope.