On September 12th, we posted an article via Benefits Canada, which talked about how fall can be a higher time for stress than even the holiday season! You can read it (or reread it) here: http://www.benefitscanada.com/benefits/health-wellness/helping-employees-transition-into-the-stress-of-fall-103341?platform=hootsuite
A study conducted with Canadians showed that for one fourth, they ranked their jobs as their number one source of stress. There can be many contributing factors to this: excessive workload, toxic work environments, lack of autonomy, management bullying, harassment or even lock of opportunities to advance. However, the number one factor when it came to job stress was staff changes.
Most of us enter a new job full of optimism. Whether it’s a fresh start, or your very first “real job”, the positive outlook can make it easier to tackle projects and learn about new things. Over time, it can be easy for any of us to focus on the negative aspects and lose sight of the positives. When this happens, all of us can feel defeated. And this defeated outlook will most certainly affect job productivity and job satisfaction.
Even the best of jobs can experience any of the above on a temporary basis, but the key is to be able to assess what is a temporary situation vs a more permanent shift. So the question becomes, how do you ride out the rough spots? Can you fall in love with your job again?
1. Focus on what you love everyday: Any job has them, as well as has tasks that are less than enjoyable. However, focusing on the positive attributes can help get you over those temporarily more difficult times.
2. Remember why you fell in love in the first place: There must have originally been a reason you chose to take the job you did… remember those reasons and use them as a way to shift your feelings of negativity back to a more positive outlook.
3. Talk about it: Find someone at work that you trust, that you can talk to about the stresses you’ve been having. If this person happens to be your supervisor, huge bonus! If not, anyone in the office can be this sounding board. Sometimes it helps feeling you have a mentor that you can turn to for advice or just to vent.
4. Participate in activities: Most workplaces plan events in the spirit of team-building and overall office wellness. Taking the time to participate in these events helps you feel more connected. Consider it an office date! (In the non- “we need to notify HR”- way of course!)
5. Don’t let a temporary stress spill over to feeling dissatisfied with everything: Learn to recognize the temporary stresses as just that, and use the above strategies to help weather those storms.
6. Know when to say when: If, after you’ve exhausted every other avenue and you still are having the reservations you originally did, maybe it’s time to move on.
Does the above advice sound like relationship advice? In a way, it is! At the end of the day, with as much time as all of us devote to our work, you need to feel overall that you are valued and that you’re happy. While work is a way to make a living and not a way to make a life, feeling stressed and frustrated in one area will most certainly carry over into another. You can afford to be a little selfish when it comes to your job. In the end, your friends and family will thank you for it!
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay