Boredom at work

Last week we looked at Sandeep who is extremely bored at his work. The intervention that he has to start making is about changing his reputation and about the choice of attitude he brings to his work. Sandeep, you need to believe that as long as you are going to be at work, you might as well have the best day you can. It is very simple to understand but very difficult to implement. It may take some time before you are able to be cheerful every day. Life is tough but you do not have to be so tough. You have invested too much in being a victim. Your organization’s needs are not different from your own – creativity, passion, flexibility, and wholeheartedness. You have probably lost faith in your ability to survive in the world; therefore, you are afraid to take a risk about changing at work. If you change, there is a possibility that you might fail and lose; if you do not change, it will be a surety. Not only that, you will have no energy or life left. Many people, somewhere along the line, stop learning and growing. Sometimes, you run so hard that you forget what you are running for. Life is hard and most people are staler in their world of work than they would care to admit. However, you have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more to give than you have ever given. There is no safe harbor, but you have to start working. Life is too precious to be passing through to retirement. A little bit of self-control and courage can help you to make changes. The next change to implement is to bring a little bit of fun to your work. Even though your work is very serious, you can be less uptight and let things flow a bit. You should smile more often at work, have more positive feelings about what you do and the way you work. Sometimes you may feel that other people in your organization are having a good time while you are trapped in your position. You take out your frustrations on others. However, if you change your attitude, you can be happy too. It is better to change your attitude in this work because there is no guarantee that the next job will be any different. You could wallow in self-pity and let life slip away in a series of missed opportunities. If you are happy, you treat others well. The time passes quickly and work becomes a reward and not just a way to reward. At the present, your staff dreads working with you. You often treat them as if they are interrupting you. You may pass them around without ever conveying an interest in solving their problem. You may appear to be attempting to avoid responsibility. Therefore they may question your very committed to the organization. No matter what excuses you offer or what kind of spin you put on it, it does not change the way they feel. You cannot change the past but you can be dedicated to being present in the present. Remember: the past is history, the future is a mystery, today is a gift and that is why we call it the present. Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account. Just waking up and doing what has to be done each day is quite mundane. In each of us, there is an eternal desire to do challenging tasks, but unfortunately, most of us sit around waiting to hear opportunities knock at the door. They do. However, perhaps we do not hear the knocks, as we want to hear the big bangs. And the fact is that many good opportunities knock very softly. Some hear the small knock and get going – they get busy, they start liking what they are doing and their negativity disappears. So, you can choose – whether you want to brood and be miserable or move ahead with enthusiasm. In order to be successful, you need to demand excellence of yourself, and not tolerate much less from others. Some feel that in the real world, excellence is something you read about and maybe talk about. It does not creep into very many real-life situations, though. However, this point of view gets you into a lot of trouble and it is obviously hard to shake off. For many years, you may be floating listlessly in a sea of mediocrity. You may have become soft and bloated. Mediocrity is an enemy that must not be ignored. A manifestation of complacency and lethargy, it has been around so long that too many of you may have got used to it. Some of the younger people have lived with it all their lives. Every part of society suffers and begins to break down. Right and wrong become blurred, along with the moral standards and attitudes at home and in the workplace. Even though small is beautiful and less is more – you settle for less quantity, less service, less courtesy, less thoughtfulness. The pursuit of excellence is considered an insensitive pursuit. So, change your focus and see whether you are able to shake off your blues.