FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR JOB

Gandhi discovered There is more to life than increasing its speed. And I think this is just beautiful. And slow is beautiful. Some things cannot and should not be sped up. They take time, they need slowness.

Have you heard about the slow movement? I know (and confirmed it through my reads) that it actually started in the city of Bra, Italy with the Slow Food movement, which supports the idea that eating should be something enjoyable, something cooked and consumed at a relaxed pace. When I was working in telesales, I remember calling clients and leads in Italy, and their lunch time was of 2 hours. Watching Michael Moore’s movie Where to Invade Next, I understood why. They go home to eat with families at lunch, that’s why their lunch time is 2 hours long. How amazing would that be to happen everywhere?

But there’s no time for that! Our corporate obsessed minds are too busy to waste 2 hours only on lunch! I mean, lunches nowadays have become like skimmed milk – a taste of lunch, to keep you skinny, yet unhealthy, hungry all the time and moody, living with the illusion that you ate well and healthy. We do not have time for our minds to chill. We keep them too busy all the time, and we demand so much of ourselves. Yet, we offer ourselves so little. Because there is no time for that either.

Slow movement is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. On the contrary, the movement is made up of people like you and me, people who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern world. The slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast (like a marathon) and be slow when slowness is called for (like having your lunch peacefully). Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto – the right speed.

The paradox is that slow does not mean slow. Performing a task in a slow manner sometimes brings faster results. It is also possible to do things quickly while maintaining a slow mindset.

I realized that Pond written by Claire Louise Bennett is a tribute to the slow movement. Because reading it, it puts you into that slow frame of mind, when you ponder your thoughts, your sensations, your perceptions, your observations, your actions and your words. Reading Pond is like sunbathing on an island you visit off peak season. You get to see the beauty of the lonely landscape, you get to appreciate it and then you wonder how you could have ever visited that in full crowded season. It’s the same with understanding the slow movement.

You must surrender to it to experiment and you will not wish to go back. I praise the slow and I praise Pond, because with each day that passes, I turn more and more to re-reading sentences in this exceptional book. It might be the fact that it feels as if I give my mind the time to enjoy each word and each logic of the train of thoughts expressed through Claire Louise Bennett’s creative writing skills. In this glorious fast-paced world, my mind has no time to grasp all that it wishes to grasp, because I am forced to hurry up and not stop to ponder or balance the world I see in my brain, I am forced to move on instead of taking it all in, I am forced to let go of things I do not wish to let go. I am told quantity is desirable, ALONG with quality. I question how can you attain 2 opposites. How can you desperately climb a mountain and enjoy the ocean simultaneously? It’s impossible. Yet, corporations and society defies all physics and forces us to convert ourselves into some kind of robots with superpowers, losing our humanity, since that’s not a resource that can make money. Multitasking does. Being paid for 2, 3 or even more jobs in a single low paid one. This is the fast world we live in. We cease to see it because it is not nice to discover you are living a delusion in which you think you are a human with a multitude of by default skills and competencies that you were brought up to take pride in.

We are being convinced it is ok and even desirable to wish to achieve robotic features. We are only convincing our minds about our souls who do not matter anymore.

Because our souls take joy in the slowness of it all. I believe we will soon move towards the slow world just as we switched to the fast paced one, since there is more to life than increasing its speed. As Claire Louise Bennett puts it in her book: “Beginning very ordinarily, it ought to be said, and then, via a series of protracted yet imperceptible increments, the sky imported the trenchant beauty and dubious brilliance of a new and unnamed world.” There are 3 ways you can fall in love with your job. The first one is to work in that field you have a passion about. The second is by achieving success in that type of activity you do, which ultimately will lead your heart to loving the job you are doing, because you are successful and you are valued for what you deliver. The third is when you try to accommodate yourself to the job, by using your skills, talents or passions at your current workplace, by either doing some extra activities (usually not paid) but that you truly enjoy and make you really love your job or by actually moving into a new role simply because the company you are working for needs that and you happen to be the right person at the right time. But this rarely happens. Or I have not come across this very often.

There is another way that can help you adjust yourself to start falling in love with your job. It is called using your character strengths in your current role or when you are searching for a new job.

A team of German researchers found that those who consider their job a calling use between 4-7 character strengths while performing it. The less character strengths you use, the less interested you are in what you do.

Therefore, once you know your character strengths (you can go to www.viacharacter.org to take the free survey to discover it) you can start using it at work or when you want to apply for a new position. I find this survey extremely helpful, because sometimes the character strengths that portray something we really love is not something we know how to name. I read about this research made on a tribe who had specific names for all green shades, which they could name, even though they were very close in shade. The researchers put these people to name our specific shade of green (the colour green as we see it) that we can all name as green (as we don’t really use shades to name the green, it’s just green in our eyes for every shade of green) and they could not name it because they did not see it before. They had no idea that particular shade of green existed prior to the research and they still could not name it. That’s because we grow up with specific notions and concepts and those concepts make us understand the world. If we do not hold a concept for a specific thing, not only we cannot see it, but we cannot name it. And even if we can see it, we won’t be able to describe it. Which makes it harder to act on it.

I feel the same thing happens when we need to pin point what is it that makes us happy at work. First of all, no one teaches us how to do that and secondly, there is no notion of attributes we should have to love our jobs. So, this specific survey The Character Strengths will reveal to you your true traits. The traits that lay hidden inside you, that you can rely on when you are in the state of flow, but that which you cannot name. As you do not know how to name something you appreciate and enjoy doing. I am referring to something very specific in a particular task. As an example, my core character strength is appreciation of beauty and excellence, followed by creativity, honesty, love, judgement and love of learning. Now, if you think about it, what jobs do you see advertised that can offer me that? The feeling of appreciation of beauty and excellence, creativity, honesty, judgement? It is a feeling I experience when I create on my blog, but then, who will pay me for my blog? I must have a huge following to start receiving an income just from my writing or sharing stuff here.

My core virtues are transcendence, wisdom, courage and humanity. This translates to me in a job related to healing, teaching, even artists. It is hard to find a job description saying we require artists. So, the true value of this survey consists in the fact that you get to have a name for what makes you happy when you work, you get to have a concept for that specific thing you experience when you are in the state of flow, you get to finally understand yourself better and to make the best of your time at work by following that which brings to you that creative freedom.

Therefore, I strongly recommend for you to take the survey, get a notion for your pleasurable attributes for working and start incorporating that more into your day to day working life or lifestyle in general. I guess it is fine to not necessarily work having to use all your character strengths, but will you feel happy to have that job?

We now have this opportunity to discover those traits and start acting on it. Because just as the people who could not name the green colour, yet they could name all shades of green, we have a lack of understanding the basics. The very thing that makes all shades of green.

And we only need between 4-7 character strengths to say that our jobs bring us joy. Have your first 7 core character strengths revealed here.