High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: 13 Practical Ways to Find Joy in Your Work

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• 13 Ways to Find Joy in Your Work: "I keep a journal of everything that I do at work so that when I am feeling drained or bored, I can use it as a reference to spark new ideas."

• The Elements of Good Judgment: "leaders with good judgment tend to be good listeners and readers—able to hear what other people actually mean, and thus able to see patterns that others do not."

• The One Question to Ask Before Setting a New Year's Goal: "Reaching your current goals isn’t the endpoint; it’s just the point where you’ll need to set new ones."

• 50 Inspirational Quotes to Motivate You: "I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."
• The Upward Spiral of Doing the Right Thing:"The vast majority of us want to make a positive contribution to the world through our work, whether by improving a single person’s day or making a system more equitable."

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: Making Joy a Priority at Work

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• Making Joy a Priority at Work: "By providing people with more of the experiences that engender joy in any team setting, leaders can tap more of the practical power of joy in their companies."

• 9 Tips for Avoiding Loneliness When You Work at Home: "Below, you’ll find a guide for avoiding loneliness when you work from home, including tips from writers like myself and other professionals who’ve learned the best ways to be social without an office."

• What Women Want at Work: "When working women have coworkers and an employer who has their backs plus the opportunity to grow and climb, both hierarchically and financially, their overall job satisfaction gets high marks."

• 10 Companies to Work For if You Want to Like Your Job: "Indeed says these companies got high marks from employees because they each provide an enjoyable work environment."
• How to Have a Difficult Workplace Conversation:"Your conversation is not only about the immediate message itself, but more importantly about the outcome and behavior you want to see afterward."

How to Experience More Joy at Work

It is possible to enjoy our work lives more than we do and it often requires just a few basic shifts in our thinking to provide us with a greater sense of purpose at work.

Unfortunately, sometimes we’re under great stress or we’ve been in a job for so long that we have difficulty seeing the beneficial aspects of our work or understanding ways to make it work better for us.

 Here are five ways to go about experiencing more joy in the work place.

Focus on the meaning you derive from your work. A key aspect to finding joy in your work is to recognize and celebrate the good that results from your job, the ways your products or services make life better for your customers and clients, and the difference your company makes in the world. If you cannot identify this important part of your job, then you might need to consider a job move. 

Cultivate positive relationships with your colleagues. It’s difficult to enjoy our work place if we don’t enjoy those we work with. Of course, you cannot control the behavior of others at work, but you can make every effort to develop good working relationships with your co-workers and manager. It will help if you seek to recognize the strengths in others rather than focus on their failures and shortcomings.

Recognize how your job makes you change and grow. If you’ve been in a job or at a company for several years you have changed during that time. You have developed new skills and grown in ways that it’s important to recognize. Take some time to appreciate this growth and it will help you to experience greater satisfaction in your job.

Use your job to strengthen your weaknesses. You can look at your job as a laboratory and a place to make improvements. Be clear about the areas you need to work on, whether related to job skills or character traits, such as patience, and seek to measure your development. Paying attention to self-improvement on your job can add a level of enjoyment to your work experience.  

Pay attention to your attitude. There are a lot of things we can’t control at work, but we always have the ability to take control of our attitude and the ways we respond to the events on the job. Greater enjoyment at work is more likely when we approach our job and our relationships with our colleagues with curiosity, and a positive and helpful attitude.