Most adults spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else. If you are unhappy there, you are unhappy a major chunk of the time.
Sharon Salzberg, renowned meditation teacher and cofounder, with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, of the Insight Meditation Society, has just released an invaluable resource on finding happiness at work. Real Happiness at Work includes practical techniques and practices for people who hate their jobs, love their jobs, or don’t care enough to belong to either group.
Her pages speak to folks seeking meaning and fulfillment in their occupations, even if their responsibilities consist of scrubbing down toilets. Here’s what she found — and how you can find real happiness at work.
After listening to the gripes and frustrations of her students and friends — as well as reviewing what researchers had to say on the subject of work — Salzberg arrived at a few themes of unhappiness:
- Burnout and the need for greater resilience
- Questionable moral practices or challenges to personal integrity
- Feelings of losing a sense of purpose and the need for deeper, more durable meaning
- Condescension by superiors who do not listen and show a lack of compassion in decision-making
- Boredom, distraction, and ineffectual multitasking due to a lack of concentration
- The longing for creativity, surprise, variety, and a more open awareness fostering flexibility and change
- The desire to understand the work environment from a more open perspective
How do you go about resolving these issues? How do you prevent them from happening in the first place? In answering these questions, Salzberg identified what she calls the Eight Pillars of Happiness in the Workplace.
Balance: the ability to differentiate between who you are and what your job is.
Finding balance requires setting priorities and building appropriate boundaries: taking the half-hour lunch that you are allotted and focusing on the responsibilities that fall under your job description, not those of your entire team. Balance is placing a higher value on self-care than boss-pleasing, connecting to the truth of your own worth, and loosening the trip of overidentification with your job.
Concentration: being able to focus without being swayed by distraction.
“Distraction wastes our energy,” writes Salzberg, “concentration restores it.” Concentration is especially crucial in our digital age because the human brain has been asked to process an immense amount of information. Workers are expected to write a report while tracking incoming data, answering email, and texting a spouse about dinner.
We may think we are successful at all the juggling; however, research indicates that the more we multitask, the more mistakes we make, affecting our overall job performance and self-esteem. Per Salzberg: “When we slow down and concentrate on doing just what is before us to be done now, we become the masters of our own environment rather than its frantic slaves.”
Compassion: being aware of and sympathetic to the humanity of ourselves and others.
To cultivate compassion, we shift the emphasis from me to we, a challenging task in work settings that are driven by competition, conflict, pressure, and stress. Equally difficult is offering ourselves the same kindness and compassion we extend to others, to believe in our self-worth independent of the blame and criticism of others.
Resilience: the ability to recover from defeat, frustration, or failure.
Resilience lies at the heart of the greatest lesson of meditation and mindfulness: to begin again without rumination or regret. “That no matter what the circumstances, we are always able to begin again in a new moment,” Salzberg writes. “This is what we mean by resilience. No matter what happens to us at work (or elsewhere), we can use challenges as opportunities to grow, increase our awareness, and learn methods for making future challenges more tolerable.”
Communication and Connection: understanding that everything we do and say can further connection or take it away.
Salzberg offers three criteria to help with skillful communication. First, is the information true? Truthfulness is most important when considering what and what not to say to our colleagues. Second, is this communication useful? Be sure to consider context, timing, and the type of person you are communicating with. Finally, will your message be delivered in a kind way — polite, nonaggressive, and nonconfrontational?
Integrity: bringing your deepest ethical values to the workplace.
Integrity is linked to authenticity, “a fundamental proclamation thatwho we are and where we are arises from an original authority that makes us decent, intelligent, and profoundly resourceful.” It means sitting with our conflicts and dilemmas in open awareness, trying to find a way to integrate our inner concerns and feelings with our outer circumstances.
Meaning: infusing the work you do with relevance for your own personal goals.
Salzberg believes some sense of meaning is vital to being happy at work, but that doesn’t mean we have to love our jobs. We could find meaning simply in being employed, in providing for a family or for ourselves. We may find meaning in the friendships we have at work. “In cases where your job does not easily align with meaningful purpose, it’s still possible to use work as an opportunity for doing good,” she writes. “Any job can be meaningful, or meaningless, depending on how we look at it.”
Open Awareness: the ability to see the big picture and not be held back by self-imposed limitations.
Writes Salzberg: “Open awareness refers to our ability to observe conditions as they are without feeling the need to change them. While this may sound passive to our action-oriented ears, the ability to rest comfortably in the present moment regardless of its imperfections is the foundation of all true happiness.”
