Are you unhappy at work and feeling de-motivated but for one reason or another, are not in a position to change jobs at the moment? This could be due to family commitments, location, financial reasons or because you are worried about the instability in this current economic climate.
If you have exhausted all possible avenues within your current organisation such as changing department or duties, an alternative for you is to simply learn to love the job you are in until such time you are able to find something else.
Research shows that when we undergo a challenge that stretches our skills and our skills and ability are sufficient to deal with the challenge, we achieve what is known as Flow (otherwise known as optimal experience). When the challenge in what we are doing and the skills we use are both high, we are happier, more cheerful, stronger, more active, concentrate more and are more creative.
If you can bring about the conditions that create optimal experience at work, you will enjoy what you do a lot more. So how can you achieve Flow in a job that you are unhappy with? Using this 5 step SUPER model for optimal experience, will help you to bring about those conditions.
1. Strengths
Identify what it is in your current role that you are good at and that you enjoy doing and do more of this.
2. Understand Your Goals
Create variety and flexible challenges in your work. Identify clear goals that will give you immediate feedback. If you don’t already have personal goals at work, set yourself some.
Make sure your goals are challenging and that they are within your skill capability. If you do not have the skills to do what you are trying to achieve, this can lead to stress and anxiety. If a goal is not stretching or challenging you enough, this can lead to boredom.
If you find that you easily achieve what is required of you, set yourself a personal challenge to achieve more. If you are struggling to achieve what is required of you, review your workload to make sure that you are not taking on too much.
3. Practice complete Concentration
Immerse yourself in what you are doing and completely focus on the task at hand so it is as if you become lost in the interaction.
4. Erase self-awarenses, self-consciousness and sense of time
Create a sense of control by losing self-consciousness in the activity. If your skills and the challenge match, your sense of self control will increase.
5. Repeat, repeat, repeat…
Repeat these activities in order to increase the number of optimal experiences you have at work and it will help you to start enjoying what you do.
Additionally, if you are a very creative person and there is little room to express this creativity in your job, find an outlet outside of work that allows you to express your creativity.
If you do not love the job that you are in and would like to make a change but are wavering about it, come along to the Reignite career change workshop on 14.9.13 and create the plan that will get you the job you love. Visit http://reigniteyourcareer.eventbrite.co.uk for further details.
Author Bio:
Carol Stewart, The London Career Designer, is a Personal Development, Career & Business Coach and founder of Abounding Solutions. She works with women in their forties who are unhappy at work but are too scared to do anything about it. She helps them to develop the confidence to make a career move and find something that they love. This could be a complete career change or it could even be exiting the corporate environment and setting up their own business.
Carol herself made a significant career change in 2011 when at the age of 44 she left the organisation she had worked in for 28 years, went back to university and set up her own business.
She is also a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management and a Member of the Association for Coaching.
Carol’s free ebook ‘5 Steps to Pursuing Your Passion at Mid-Life – A Guide to Designing a Career You Love’ can be downloaded at http://aboundingsolutions.com/ .
