In this week’s Workplace Wellness, we discuss the benefits of bringing purpose into the day-to-day of your career.
In careers, just like the rest of life, there are peaks and valleys. Looking back on your own career, you most likely can remember those times – the great managers and the poor managers, the exciting projects and the mundane, the toxic workplaces and the colleagues who felt like friends.
What we usually miss is that all of these ups and downs are, in fact, progress. The downs just as much as the ups. All the difficulties we face – and even the everyday routine moments we hardly notice – they’re all just as important for our career journey as our triumphs and accomplishments.
If you look back at your own career, you’ll most likely find that you grew and discovered more about your own innate capabilities during the challenging times. But how often do we see these moments as opportunities when we are in the thick of it? In those moments, it often feels like we’re just trying to survive, or get to the next task.
So how can we shift that perspective? How can we make the great, mundane, and challenging moments of work support a bigger picture? In the moment of stress or work turmoil, how can we see it as a great step in the journey?
Learning the skills associated with the fourth pillar of the Healthy Minds Framework for Well-Being, Purpose, can bring a wider perspective to the setbacks we face. It is the skill of bringing purpose into everyday life, that can make our everyday feel like something that is always helping us reach our goals.
- To get started, first tune back into previous work experiences by creating a timeline of your career. Write down your highs and lows. Dig into what you learned about yourself in all of those times. Dig into the subtle shifts and experiences that brought you to where you are now in your career.
- Reflect on how much you’ve grown and bask in appreciation for those experiences.
Now that you have reflected on how both challenging and good times have supported your career trajectory, get started on bringing purpose into your day-to-day job at this moment.
Bringing purpose into everyday life is a helpful way to make this perspective shift second nature. This 10 minute seated meditation (also found on the Healthy Minds Program app), is an ideal starting point.
When we’ve got our eyes on some distant horizon, it becomes a lot easier to handle the peaks and valleys. A sense of purpose helps us avoid getting discouraged by the long monotonous straightaways or those twists and turns that make us feel like we’re going backwards.
Learn more about how the Healthy Minds Framework can support your workplace well-being with Healthy Minds @Work or join our intensive public MasterClass to learn the Healthy Minds Framework for Well-Being on your time.
