This is not an article about love in the workplace per se. It is more about why love is important for me in the workplace and how you can leverage love at work for your successful career. Of course, this is my personal experience.
Before I share my love experience at work, let me start with definition of love that to me is relevant for work. Love is (as noun) a great interest and pleasure in something or a deep feeling of affection to someone. Therefore love is about intense feeling of pleasure and affection to someone or something.
Love for Work
I love every role I have in my career. I think about my job often, what else can I do to make do justice to the role. This is not a matter for me to get next promotion fastest but it is a matter of I love my work enough (or sometime a lot) that I want to get to know all the element and elements surrounding my role so I can truly do well. When you do many things because you want to get promotion and / or salary increase, sometimes we can be impatient and when it does not happen as fast as we want, we become upset and either reduce our intensity at work or turn to become bitter and impart negative effect to our collegues, neither which will be seen as positively impacting working environment let alone add values. Even when you are not valued well within the company and are looking to calibrate externally ( aka looking for work outside your present company ), your deliverables during the difficult periods need to still be masterly delivered and thus your love to work perhaps can be the thing that will keep you passionate enough for delivering beyond average.
The most important question is how to keep love to our work alive and the simple answer is that to keep finding things you love about work. I love my work because there is always potential to bring positive impact to the community around us, I love my work also because I love doing sexy works and I always find my works to be sexy (because they are complex, require cutting edge business knowledge and can deliver material commercial impact), so take a pause and think what are the elements that make your work exciting for you.
Love for Your Team
What makes life interesting is that when we are in the midst of people we love. We spend time at work at least 8 hours a day for 5 days, online and offline, so at least 40 hours or nearly 50 % of our waking moment. If we can spend half of our waking moments with people we love, i.e people we want to give pleasure in interacting as much as they give us pleasure in our interaction, would not it be great. Pleasure is not always about being in great time, pleasure is also how we interact in difficult time and as well when we face differences. With our loved ones, we always try to be understanding when they face challenges but at the same time push them to be the best that they can be.
Loving someone is not the same as indulging someone, indulging can actually be less caring especially if at the end it will do more damage in the future. Loving your team also means you want to see them becoming the very best version of themselves, even if sometime you have to give them constructive feedback. You give them because you love them. I always love the team I work with, they will always be my team, my extended family and wherever they go and progress, I always be proud of them. I have been blessed that they bestow me with honest feedbacks from time to time to help me grow to be who I am today. To me it is invaluable gifts and for that I am eternally gratefull. For that, I will always ready to help them to achieve their ambitions.
What If You Don’t Feel You Love Your Work Neither Your Team ?
There is such thing as love grow out of daily interaction, that love grow quietly and sometime unexpectedly. As long as you open your heart and mind, to see the good in what you do and with who you work with. And there is always that. Sometime we see difficult people as that, people who are not out there enabling us to perform well. However my experience difficult people, who ask questions, who hesitant in making decision, are people who take extra caution because they want things to be done well. For them and for you. People who are aloof are introvert people who will take time to warm but once you are in, you are in their heart and mind all the way. Work is similarly sometime tedious, sometime challenging, but challenging work are those that help you stretch to become the very best of yourself and tedious work are those that train you to master certain task and if you stop and think, it is almost always important part of bigger picture. Love that sometime take time to grow last long.
Love Need Nurture and Work
Just like in relationship you need to nurture it otherwise the feeling may subside, so is love at work. Spend time with your colleague, lunches, conversations and even occasional dinner or fun, will help them to get to know you and vice versa and of course create memories together. Work you do, require you to get better at it, to help you ease and the more masterful you are, the more pride you have and the more you understand the impact the more fun, the happier you will be at work. Spend time to grow your mastery at your work. Keep the negative feeling at bay, taking time off sometime great to help you get back refreshed, just like sometime you need me time in your life. That is what annual leave and holidays are for.
What If the Feeling is just not there ?
Sometime we are not meant to be in life or sometime love runs its course. Sometime it was not meant to be for whatever reason. None of them are bad reasons to walk away from what you doand who you are with, at work. However, just like in relationship you want to end on a high note despite difficulties, remembering the good relationship and what it contributes to your personal growth, it is important that you take care of things in relationship well until it is over. It is the honorable thing to do as a person and not burning bridges makes future life easier. Because you never know in life.
How Do You Know If You are in Love ?
When you wake up on Monday morning, in the most challenging period, you told yourself that you will present and try to be there for everyone at work. When things are extremely difficult and you do not know the answer and you tell yourself you will give your best shot to have a crack at solving what is in front of you. When you talk to your friend and ask opinion on how to make it work. When you step into your office, you smile and you feel happy. That’s what love it, it is always about trying to be present and to be better everyday.
Happy Valentine !
