So, do you like your job?

This story is inspired by real events in my personal life and counseling I did of a few people when they were facing hurdles at work. It tries to bring to light how lack of purpose, gratitude and limiting beliefs can lead to a) easily giving up when challenges come up b) feelings of entitlement that others owe them and c) not so great relationships. It also shows how one can learn to make changes in their own attitude to feel happier and more fulfilled at work.

I love playing cricket! Long, long ago I used to be a wicket-keeper for my school and college teams and also made valuable contributions with the bat every now and then (though I never got to play full time for college and was a substitute player ??).

It’s a surprise though that I chose to be a wicket-keeper. As a kid, all I wanted to do was bat! I didn't like to field or bowl and would make excuses to sit out after my batting was over ??.?Some kids would get mad and call me "cheater", but I wouldn't care. Then one day, I got a warning that I would be left out of team if I didn't mend my ways. I reluctantly started fielding but I used to hate it, so I wouldn't make any extra effort to stop the ball.

Compared to batting, fielding takes a lot more time, effort and sweat (sometimes under the hot sun). Despite that, usually one gets more brickbats for a misfield or a dropped catch than accolades for a good job done.

However, as time went by, I slowly realized many other folks just like me didn't like fielding either, yet they were putting their 100% into it. One day I asked a friend why he was doing that, and he said "Jeetna hai toh karna padega!" ("If you want to win, then need to do it!").

That was a profound message that hit me hard. I realized I was only focused on pleasure of batting and trying to avoid the unpleasantness of fielding. If there is a higher purpose, then fielding is just another thing to do towards that end. I made amends and by the time I was in high school, wicket keeping had become a passion! I loved to dive and take catches and keep the fielders in the slip area on their toes??.

Similarly, many important things we do regularly in life is also like building a relationship with it - the good part usually comes packaged with a set of challenges as well. There is no perfect relationship.

I personally would be happy to sneak out of unpleasant chores, such as joining my family in cleaning up after a daily ritual of dinner at home ??, however my higher purpose of helping my loved ones and being aware of the joy it brings to them keeps me motivated enough to give a hand. If someone loves building new exciting features for their product, they need to be ready to do the challenging task of maintaining it as well when it breaks in production (sometimes at 3AM in the morning??). There could be other examples from your own life that you can relate to, however you will find that there is no perfect relationship where you can wish the challenges away.

Work is like a relationship too, and we spend a significant portion of our waking time at work (even more than with our loved ones!).

Yet sometimes we tend to focus only on its challenges or hurdles and become uninspired, while ignoring that there may be many things about our jobs that we could be enjoying as well.

It's human nature to pay excessive attention to the negative, and what we focus on becomes our reality. Have you thought about your emotional account balance with your job? Do you have more deposits or more withdrawals?

Taking some time out regularly to reflect and express gratitude to life has personally helped me shift my focus back to the positive aspects of my job. Else its not very hard to start feeling entitled.

Think hard about whether for the challenges we are facing, is there a higher purpose that we could connect it to?

Have you ever thought about vision and mission of your own life? Have you challenged some of your own beliefs that could be limiting your thought process?

Many a times having a personal vision statement has helped me understand and respect all the craziness happening out there with a totally new perspective. Speaking of limiting beliefs, for instance, I used to believe that releasing a bunch of features together was always the best thing to do for maximum customer delight. In many cases it used to work as timelines were typically short. However in one of the long running critical projects, after 8 months of my team working hard and with not a single feature released to production, I realized I was wrong and many folks were not happy either. This had slowed down my own growth as well. After learning this lesson the hard way, I changed my belief to become more flexible and started accommodating incremental release of features in all my future plans.

If you are not able to find answers alone, talk to your mentor or a well wisher to help find that purpose. Talk to your manager about working on things that motivate you, and try to find solutions for the challenges you are facing using the new found purpose.

Meta point is to put in all the efforts you can to make this relationship with your current job work. For any relationship to succeed a positive emotional account balance is needed. Maybe if we say yes! to our job, it will say yes! to us too.

Despite trying so hard, if you still think that challenges are far greater than all the excitement your job has to offer, then maybe its time to move on.

It's ok to change your role/job or even your career path itself so that you can find the key ingredients of passion and higher purpose! However, remember that higher salary can't help buy inspiration in your new job if purpose still goes missing. Just coasting along without a purpose won't help in the long run.

I personally love my current job and feel blessed to have wonderful leaders. Make no mistake, there are many things which I don't feel excited about either, however I get to work on many things which I am deeply passionate about as well, such as full ownership of challenging projects with high global impact, coaching and taking care of my team, and driving innovation at hackathons. I feel grateful my managers make 100% effort to find projects that are aligned with my interests. It may not be possible to do this every time, however it's comforting to know that they at least tried.?I take pride in my business unit's unique employee friendly culture that pursues work-life balance, personal and career growth as a mission!

I also want to take this opportunity to thank all my peers and managers over my career who have provided me great company and support, and from whom I have learnt a great deal.

So coming back to you, what's your higher purpose(s)? If you haven't found one yet, then go find one if you want to enjoy the journey of your life. Are you happy about maintaining a positive emotional balance with your job? After all, you owe it to yourself to wake up every morning feeling inspired to go to work!

Kanishka Shrivastava | Kulo | Rajiv Kumar | Aditya Naredi | Shashank Likhite | Pankaj Chawla | Aaron Fernandes | Sreekanth Kolluri | Tejpaul Verma | Gautham | Colin White | Lokesh Reddy | Rameek Bhasin | Gautam Bhargava | Chris Gallagher

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