Most of us aren’t very good at appreciating our jobs when we have them. We look at everything that’s going wrong instead of what’s going right. Sure, most employers could do better of saying thanks and making the office a place where we want to be. But in the meantime, we could all use our gratitude intervention.
If we have five things going right in the day in our office and one that going wrong, we drive home thinking about the one that went wrong. But, we don’t know that fretting makes us even more stressed and not helping us handle the bad stuff.
We should recount all the good things that have happened during the day while driving home. Probably it will be hard at first, but after a while it will become natural. This will make us happy at home, and it will help us not to lose edge at work. We can keep one eye on the future, but the other one should get focused on being grateful for right now.
If gratitude is a part of our life, we become eager to face every day. We will start waking up earlier and felt more energized. A research done by Robert Emmons at the University of California, Davis, shows that people who are grateful gain a sense of purpose and desire to achieve.
In one study, volunteers were asked to write down six things they wanted to accomplish in the next ten weeks. Some of them were then randomly assigned to keep a gratitude journal once a week. At the end of the experiment, the grateful group made 20 percent more progress toward their goals than the non-grateful group.
At this point, you’re grumbling that if your job were a little better, you would be more grateful.
Even if one has a high-paying, and prestigious position, he will not be grateful for his work. But a job never looks the same from the inside as it does from the outside.
Masello got antsy sitting for hours in the writers’ rooms, brainstorming plot lines, and frustrated when his own (brilliant) ideas were shot down. One day when he felt particularly irritable, he went to the men’s room to splash cold water on his face. A janitor came in, whistling happily—and chatted cheerfully as he started to clean. The irony hit Masello hard.
“I was probably earning more in an hour than that nice guy made in a week, but he appreciated his job, and I hated mine,” Masello told. “What sense did it make that he was happier than me?”
Masello realized that whether cleaning toilets or writing a TV show (and no jokes comparing them), the actual job mattered less than the attitude he brought to it.
Most jobs have both pleasures and drudgery. When you’re home tonight complaining about your boss or railing about corporate incompetence—stop for a moment. Imagine that you have to leave your job tomorrow. Is there anything you’ll miss?
If the answer is—I won’t miss anything, and then it’s time to look for a new job.
But maybe, like the guy at the Fortune 500 Company, you’ll miss the first-class travel. Or the energy and excitement around a big project. Maybe you’ll just miss the free coffee in the office kitchen.
Take a minute to be grateful for the positives right now. It can make you feel better—and do better.
"Summarized the topic by Janice Kaplan, Editor-in-Chief of Parad Magazine."
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