Kick starting a stalled routine…
I clearly remember the first day on my dream job, thinking “this is the life! I’m finally doing what I love to do! It will never get old!” Except that in five years…it did get old, and I found myself just pluggin’ away at what had become little more than “a daily grind”.
Most of us don’t go out looking for a job we can hate. We typically look for work that we think we can at least tolerate and hopefully even enjoy, yet if you’ve been in/at the same business for any length of time you have probably entertained thoughts of quitting, of packing it in. How does something we used to enjoy and find interesting end up becoming so boring? Why is it not fun anymore? These are great questions to ask, and though it may be difficult or even painful to answer them honestly, it is quite possibly the only way to get beyond where we are, and to re-kindle some level of inspiration and joy in what will likely consume a good percentage of the rest of our life.
One of the interesting patterns I have discovered in my life, has been that any activity that I have enjoyed participating will invariably become less enjoyable, and perhaps even a drudgery when it becomes something I “have to do every day”. I first noticed this when I took my first full-time position as a Minister of Music. I loved singing and church music! It was like “I can’t believe I’m being paid to do this”. At that point, I couldn’t wait to get to work each day, yet by about five years in, I was dragging myself out of bed in the morning hoping I could survive to my next day off. What changed? I was still doing more or less the same things I had been doing at the beginning, but the passion and joy was gone.
There is a saying that often appears in social media memes: “Find a way to make a living doing what you love and you’ll never have to work again”. I’m going to pretend I’m one of those media fact checkers and put a “partly false” label on that one. While it is true that it is advisable to make our primary occupation something we can be passionate about, if we make the primary way we earn our living, there will still be days that we have to do some things we’d rather not be doing.
I have since come up with a better approach that helps to kick-start a stalled routine. It has entirely to do with attitude. I currently work full time in an area that I would not call one of my passion areas. I also work part-time in music ministry, a passion area in which it has once again become a joy to serve, and I have found another creative outlet in the area of web-development as home based business. Astoundingly to me, I still also find time to golf, and travel with my family, and it’s not because I’m some super organized, highly efficient work-a-holic. I attribute most of it to a simple, but deliberate, change in my attitude that I more or less stumbled upon serendipitously.
When I began the full-time job I currently hold, I knew I would have to do something different to keep my attitude toward it positive because it was not in an area of passion, so despite the fact that I was not thrilled about having to regularly wake up in time to get to work by 7 am and work 12 hour days, I made the deliberate choice to change the way I talked about my “job”. Instead of groaning “I have to go to work tomorrow” in the evening prior to days I had to work, I would say, in as cheerful a voice as I could muster, “I get to go to work tomorrow”, which reminded me that there was a time when I did not have a job and could not go to work, and that there were many people in my community who wished they could go to work but could not, because they were not able to find suitable work. What amazed me most was how it changed the attitude with which I went to work. It also changed the way I interacted with fellow employees, and I found that I actually could enjoy working even when I was asked to do jobs I didn’t find particularly enjoyable doing.
The attitude with which we arise each morning is a choice. I have the option to choose a bad attitude, and to snarl and snap at any and everyone who crosses me. I also have the option to choose to want to approach every item on my to do list with an attitude of “I get to do this today!”
Every task, every encounter we have with people, is an opportunity for us to choose to make our day (and perhaps someone else’s) better, or bitter. If you want to kick-start a stalled routine, choose the better attitude.