Is It Time for You to Love Your Work? 

Do you love your work?

The relationship we have with our work is one of the most important relationships of our lives.

It’s a relationship that, on average, people might invest 80,000 hours of their lives into. And sadly, it appears to be one of the worst relationships people have.

For instance, according to the Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, 85 percent of workers worldwide are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work.

If you are wondering what that means economically, the reported consequence of this is approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity. Even more importantly to me, this finding indicates that people spend the most valuable resource they have (a large portion of their lifetime) doing something they don’t love and would choose not to do if given the choice.

In other words, for most people, love and work are completely unrelated.

This is a problem on a massive scale and one that nobody can legitimately claim to resolve in a short article. When I work with people on bridging the gap between love and work, I expect this process to take months. In reality, bringing our love to our work is a lifelong journey so the most an article such as this one can do is provide a rough map for that quest.

If the popularity of advice relating to passive income and early retirement is any indication, many people see work only as something that we do to pay the bills.

If you’re overworked and stuck in an unhappy career, it’s understandable that you might dream of retiring and spending the rest of your life lounging on an exotic beach. However, in my experience of working with individuals in that situation, there’s an innate drive in most humans to feel a sense of purpose and to make a contribution. Once overworked people feel restored after having enough downtime, the desire to meaningfully participate in society through work tends to emerge.

And this innate drive is simply not fulfilled by spending one’s entire life on a beach (unless one decides to become a lifeguard).

It is for this reason that it’s to our benefit to acknowledge the importance of work for its own sake.

Viktor Frankl ---psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, founder of logotherapy, and author of the best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning ---also had a strong opinion on the subject: "[t]here is nothing in the world [...] that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life."

And one of the three ways he identifies as allowing one to discover this meaning in life is: work.

After recognizing the importance of work for its own sake (and not only as a means to pay bills), the next step is to realize that love and work can actually go together.

While there are many ways to express the interconnection between love and work, I’ve never seen a more beautiful one than this short phrase by the poet and writer Khalil Gibran: "Work is love made visible."

In his poem On Work, Gibran also states that “all work is empty save when there is love” and describes working with love in the following way: “It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.”

Now---what would it be like to consider the possibility that work can be approached this way?

 The next step in the journey is to recognize why it’s helpful to bring love to your work.

It might seem that the benefits of this are primarily internal---for instance, by making one’s professional life more fulfilled. Of course, that by itself might make it worth it to bring work and love together.

However, as leadership expert Steve Farber accurately points out, “Love is good business.”

In other words, there are tangible material and financial benefits that result from approaching work from a place of love. These can include higher productivity as well as better client satisfaction and retention. Approaching work from a place of love might even reduce certain risks, given that a weak relationship between patient and doctor reportedly puts a physician at a higher likelihood of being sued for medical malpractice.

To give a practical example of the immense impact that love can have on one’s work: when a business owner I coached focused on bringing love to work, it not only increased her own work happiness but led to higher employee productivity and increased revenue within two weeks.

While we can apply the previous steps in any work environment, it’s also true that external changes, such as looking for a new job or career, might be required to take the next step on the journey of bringing love and work together.

If you find that this is the case for you, it’s good to acknowledge this need for adjustment without unduly rushing the process. Making these external changes generally takes time---often more than we are comfortable with---and might also require getting help from others.

In addition to seeking whatever support you need, it is also helpful to give yourself sufficient time to discover what could allow you to more fully bring your love to your work.

P.S.: If you need help, I'm available for you.