629: Ideas To Rediscover Joy At Work

For many, work has become an unavoidable and sustained pot hole along the chaotic highway of our day to day that knocks the alignment from the goal of peace each of us has in life. Beckoning a variety of responses from the menu of emotions available to us throughout the day, we respond to life's potholes with entitlement and exasperation feeling betrayed when we get thrown off track.   We want happiness, when truthfully, we expect a nonlinear annoyance to be the theme of our Monday through Friday. It would serve us well to contemplate a novel concept; happiness is spasmodic, temporary; joy is manufactured and intentional. Canadian psychologist Philip Brickman and American psychologist Donald Campbell coined the aptly named phrase “hedonic treadmill” in the 1980s.  It is the thought that happiness is fleeting, always seeing it in the short jolts by which it comes, and yet always looking for more.  The elation or misery that comes typically returns to a baseline emotion quickly. The happiness we seek in our work will under-satisfy because the treadmill of life marches on at a steady pace forcing us to continue moving on rarely allowing us to sit in those happy moments for long.   Each moment ceases quickly to become embraced with gratitude in favor of being installed as a new level of expectation. Jean-Jacques Rousseau warns that “these conveniences (think happy moments) by becoming habitual had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable… men were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.” In our work at Business On Purpose with heroic business owners, we’ve achieved a notable level of chaos-busting tools and coaching, and yet a failure that we have had since we started in 2015 is building an incentive compensation structure and coaching module that works for everyone.  We have never seen more than 10-15% of employees offer a sincere and non-expectant thank you for additional compensation received (bonuses, etc.) Why? Maybe the joy of possessing them was immediately rooted out by the numbness of expecting them. Employees are hoping for a “hit” when they get the next pay bump or are lauded with the next award.  It wears quickly and returns to baseline leaving us in need of more.  More hits.  More substance.  More of something to numb the reality I feel that you cannot see… the reality that I live with internally but rarely share with you.   Recently, we began asking a new question during our every-other-weekly individual check-in with team members:  Can you describe a hard moment that you experienced these past two weeks, and how you found joy in that moment? We focus on joy rather than happiness because it seems that joy is a choice, where happiness is a feeling. Feelings will not sustain because we rarely control them, choices will sustain precisely because we have the option to opt-in or out. James was the son of an Israeli Construction worker who lived in a village town between Haifa on the Mediterranean and the modern Sea of Galilee. When they were older, his brother was falsely accused of a crime, and murdered in public.  James himself was later beheaded because of his teaching and his body buried in Spain. What sort of teaching could be so vile that it results in a man’s beheading? This is a paraphrased excerpt of a key element of James’ message, “(In all things) joy… make it your in-front-of (first before any) thought”. That’s it.   A message of actively choosing joy in front of any other response is a core part of the message that ended a notable man’s life.   Joy is the “willful acceptance that a situation has brought you favor” and it brings long-term value.  Hard things bring testing, testing provides conditioning and endurance, that endurance reinvests into growth and fullness, and fullness counteracts the isolation of emptiness. Joy says, “I accept hard things to endure because the outcome is fullness.” Our modern work environment shuns and works endlessly to mitigate difficulty.  Conditioning, endurance, growth, and fullness cannot divorce themselves from quandary and perplexity.  To garner the refreshment of fullness, we must walk through the pluff mud of decomposed problems.  If problems did not exist, then there would be no need for your labor to solve those problems.   Problems are a fundamental reason for work.  Problems provide opportunity both to solve the problem and to build endurance. How do we choose joy while staring down the barrel of problems?   Joy willfully accepts the problem realizing the outcome and the long-tail value that outcome of endurance and fullness. How do you rediscover joy at work?  Begin by reframing problems as endurance-developing opportunities knowing that fullness is on its way leaving you spent and satisfied instead of exhausted and vexed.