Bored at work? Looking for a new job means you’re probably looking in the wrong place
I saw this ad in the subway and confess it made me smile, but if you want to like your job more, I suggest it gives counterproductive advice and focuses your attention in the wrong place.
The door was opening and I didn’t have time to get all the text, but it reads
If the best part of your day is taking a 20-minute break to throw birds at pigs, it might be time to find a new job.
Clever and timely, but it focuses on your job as the source for your job satisfaction. A web site that benefits from you searching for jobs wants you to look at the job as the source of your satisfaction, but you can do better. Boredom and satisfaction happen in you, not outside of you, and come from your interaction with your environment, not purely from your environment.
If you want less boredom, develop your business, social, and personal skills. Depending on others for your satisfaction, happiness, or any other emotional state puts you in a state of dependency. Depending on something abstract like a job makes you dependent on something you can’t even touch or communicate with. That’s great for a job search web site that benefits from you flitting from job to job, but it doesn’t help you.
Improving communication skills with others, learning to create opportunity, to influence decision-makers to give you responsibility, and so on, these things improve your job. If you leave every job you get bored at, don’t like the management of, or whatever, you’re just hoping to chance on a leader who takes time to take care of you when you don’t even care of yourself. Don’t hold your breath.
I’m not talking about learning business skills like accounting, project management, programming or other professional skills, as much as they may help you get promoted. They don’t necessarily improve your emotional state. I’m talking about emotional skills.
They’ll improve your emotional state and help you motivate others, like your managers, to improve your position in the hierarchy and pay scale too.
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