It Can't Be All Good, All the Time: Why You'll Hate Your Job, & Why That's OK

Hold on to your yoga mats, friends; I’m about to shock you all:

You can hate your job.
Even when you’ve achieved your dream . . .
the Holy Grail . . . your inspired solo practice . . .
You can, and you will . . . at some point.

And here’s more shocking news:

That’s OK.

Meet The Other Dave Navarro

No, not that one. This one.

Dave’s a North Carolina business coach who writes a blog at Rock Your Day, humorously trading on his namesake’s career to drive home his points. You can find him on Twitter on occasion, too: @davenavarro.

While I generally like the blog and Dave’s rock star style, I do have some unsolicited advice for all bloggers generally, and for Dave specifically: check your blogs in ALL major browsers before taking it public, or immediately thereafter. There’s apparently a “does not play well with Firefox” note on Dave’s site’s report card — witness the question marks, which you can see if you use Firefox. Those same marks are gone in Safari, which lets me know it’s most probably a standards question, and a not-at-all uncommon one.

Dave Sez “Welcome to the Jungle”

Dave points out some cold, hard truths: even for the most exciting and personally relevant (and intrinsically rewarding) goals — like setting up your solo practice, maybe? — there will undoubtedly be points along the path that find you demoralized, dejected, and decidedly not loving life.

It’s what you do at that precise moment, I’d suggest, that separates the rock stars from the shower singers.

Do you resent, resist, and grumble your way through the “musts” and the “shoulds”?

Or do you recognize it for what it is — one of Randy Pausch’s infamous “brick walls”? You know — the things built to keep other people out — the ones who don’t want it badly enough?

Dave reminds us of the reality:

Customers have problems. Business partners don’t work out. Projects that seemed on schedule get delayed. Insult is added to injury, and you just don’t know how to get your groove back. Remember, motivation isn’t the ability to get hyped up, passionate and excited. It’s the ability to make yourself do the damned work when it’s not fun.

Getting Through the Jungle

Sharpen your machete, and try Dave’s tips. A few that especially resonated with me:

• “Give yourself permission to hate the work you’re doing.” This one in particular made me smile, as I’m a fairly upbeat and positive person by nature but even I have my down days. It’s true that my worst day as a solo is still ten times better than my last day at the old job, but I still have problems and rough spots that I need to get through, or at least navigate with a minimum of upheaval. Simply giving yourself permission to not love every single moment of your new practice goes a long way towards alleviating the stress that accompanies such experiences.
• “Decide to respect yourself in the morning.” Some mental games I play with myself basically boil down to me recognizing the task is unpleasant, I am the heroine of the movie and the only one who can get it done, and when I accomplish the task, I will have earned the medal. This is essentially what Dave’s saying here: find the honor in completing the task, and not weaseling out of it.
• “Recognize that this is just a phase, and it will pass.” Here’s where yoga can help. One thing we work on when we’re “on the mat” is equanimity: being nonreactive in the face of a great stress. On the mat it’s usually a physical stress — a difficult asana (pose) that leaves muscles quivering. But this skill can also be used to remain nonreactive in the face of psychological work-related stress — including the stress that comes from facing a fear that you’ve made a mistake by going out on your own, and isn’t that what’s really going on with these moments of soul-sickness at the thought of continuing to do your job?

Another tip — something that helps me over the rough spots — is to practice your gratitude skills. I say “skills” because that’s what it is — a technique that you need to develop and that you need to continue to work on, in order to keep it coming easily to you. The benefits of expressing and, most of all, feeling grateful for your practice — all of it, even the parts you hate — are numerous, but perhaps chief among them is this: it trains you to notice (and therefore feel grateful for) more and more previously unnoticed aspects of your practice and life.

Can such gratitude eventually squeeze out the antipathy? Perhaps. But you’ll know you’ve really made it when you can be grateful even for the antipathy — when you realize how it serves you, how it brings you blessings. Even if it’s only in the ability to make you appreciate the good stuff when it finally comes back around.

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