You’ve found the perfect job and you love it. You feel productive and valued and enjoy the work you do. However, over time you’ve found that demands on your time have increased, you’re feeling more stress than you had before and overall the workplace culture has seemed to shift. (This can be for a variety of reasons: job demands, tighter deadlines, temporary events, or the number one reason that can affect a workplace culture: staff changes). It’s 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. But you really can fall in love with your job again. In a study conducted in 2012, Canada was ranked as the second happiest country in the world to live in. Defining factors in this study were mental health, physical health, sense of community and stress. While this is a very positive step in the right direction, studies have also found that we deal with our share of stress. ¼ of Canadians cite the workplace as their number one source.  Attributing factors to this are excessive workload, isolation, extensive hours worked, toxic work environments, lack of autonomy, difficult relationships among co-workers and management, management bullying, harassment and lack of opportunities or motivation to advancement in one’s skill level. Even the best of jobs can experience any of the above list 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?

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!  

 

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