10 little life hacks to fall in love with your career over and over again…

With Cupid’s arrow pointing in every direction this month, make sure it’s pointing in the direction of your career!

With 7.4 being the average daily hours a UK worker spends at work, there are lots of reasons to love your career. That’s before mentioning that happy workers are more productive (12% more productive to be precise) and twice as social, happy and overall healthier.

The biggest one for us however, is that loving your job can reduce how tired you feel at work! So with that said, bring forth the love!

1. Love your ‘To Do’ List: Yeah, you read that right; loving your ‘To Do’ list is possible. Rather than approaching your ever growing list with a growing sense of dread, approach it with your body clock in mind. The trick to cracking your love for your list is knowing when you’re peaks and troughs are, meaning that tasks that require more graft are to be completed when you’re energy levels are spiking.

2. Love Tea Time: This one is obvious, but one too many of us are still skipping it. Before frantically scrambling an email together to send to Arthur in Finance, go and spend 5 minutes away from your activity station and make that well deserved cup of tea. Removing yourself from your routine and a place you can associate with stress is well worth it. You’ll come back to your desk feeling refreshed and that email for Arthur will be so professionally written with no grammatical or spelling errors in sight! Fantastic!

3. Love Your Co-Workers: Ok, so Mandy in IT has a tendency to slightly grind your gears, but who’s to say that Mandy doesn’t have some great qualities too? Why not pull up a pew and get talking over lunch one day? You may just discover that your love of Dancing on Ice is shared quite passionately. Bumping into Mandy from then on might actually become a pleasure rather than a pain!

4. Love the phrase ‘I Can’: Turn that frown upside down and start seeing challenges at work in a more positive light. Rather than saying, ‘I will never get this done’, ‘I feel so stressed’ and ‘this just isn’t plausible’, start to alter your mind-set and train yourself to react in a more positive and proactive way. What you initially would have jumped on as being ‘impossible’ might actually be more than ‘possible’ with a new ‘can do you’.

5. Love Asking For Help: How many times and be honest here, have you sat staring blankly at the problem in front of you feeling too nervous to speak up and ask for help? Trust us when we say, ‘that a problem shared is a problem halved’. If you’re stuck, even after being told 200 times or more, please always ask another time. Asking will help you to clear your mind, feel confident in what you are delivering and reduce stress. Asking for help is the most pro-active thing you can do, so do it!

6. Love Your Enemies: We all have little demons called ‘time thieves’ who sit alongside us at work. Time thieves are the tasks that you avoid, put off or really dislike doing! Grab a pen and paper, make a mental note or type up the time-thieves in your work agenda. Once you have figured out the parts of your role that you aren’t so keen on, you then have room to implement a plan of action. Can you set aside 15 minutes a day to do the not so enjoyable tasks? Is it a case of figuring out if the jobs you love, other people in your team dislike and vice-versa and coming up with a plan around this? The problem with time-thieves is they take up too much of your time thinking about how much you don’t want to do them rather than just getting on with the task at hand. The solution is to stop time-thieves in their tracks; once you spend less time putting off and more time doing you’ll feel much better.

7. Love To Train: Don’t subject yourself to the fatal ‘brain drain’. Humans are very social and stimulated creatures, designed to be proactive. Casting our minds back to our cave day origins, we can identify that we were ‘go getters’, driven by the ambition to survive. Times have undoubtedly changed, but a lot of our human make-up has not, meaning that most work-based depression can be traced back to ‘boredom’ as people sit clock watching. To help the minutes fly by, ask what else you can do. Is there any training available? Have you caught wind of a company re-shuffle and feel ready to take the next step up the career ladder? Why not spend 5 minutes gathering your ideas and submit them to your boss? Ask how you can improve? Once you feel challenged, your work environment will become a naturally better place to be.

8. Love The Great Outdoors: 5 minutes of fresh air can work wonders. Lunchtime is a great opportunity to take a walk either alone or with colleagues. The blast of Vitamin D has been proven to induce ‘happy hormones’. Fresh air is also good for helping you to feel more awake and ready to face the afternoon.

9. Love To Speak Up: Unleash your inner child and create praise for yourself at work. Let’s face it, we all love a good ego stroke; being told that we have contributed to something, are doing well or being asked our opinions making us feel valued are a great way to boost confidence and plaster a big Cheshire cat style smile across our faces. To achieve the ‘feel good factor’ start speaking up; if you have an idea in a meeting, say it. If you notice a gap in the market, share it. If you see a social post that caught your attention, screenshot it. At the end of the day, you can create your own success. If you have what it takes or you know you can do something better than it’s already being done, then speak up. Your bosses will thank you for it and you’ll love yourself for it; win, win!

10. Love Organisation: Feeling overwhelmed is never enjoyable. By taking a step back, gathering all of the information and creating these into an organised and prioritised plan of action is a good approach to take. When you know where you have to be, what you have to do and by when and with whom, can help to iron out those niggling work uncertainties and reduce feelings of anxiety. If you are unsure of a deadline or certain information, be sure to ask. Seeking out direction is central to feeling on track and ultimately happier at work.

Feel The Love

There we have it, a quick list to get you and your career on the road to love!

By simply getting organised, creating a ‘To Do’ and getting to know your colleagues, you will have a much better chance at falling head over heels for your career.

Who said that romance was dead?

Feel the career love by signing up to one of fabulous Apprenticeships or Learning and Development courses here.