What is your experience of your work?
Whether you have your own business or are an employee, this is an important question. We all have difficult days (sometimes weeks), but overall would you rate your working life as a positive and fulfilling experience? Or, are you holding on by the skin of your teeth, doing it for the money or convenience?
When your work feels stressful or difficult for a lot of the time, this can be an indication that you are working in a role or environment that is out of alignment with your personal values.
Our personal values are an intrinsic foundation to our experience of wellbeing and fulfillment. If you ignore these values, or are just unclear about them, then you can find yourself in situations that are ultimately unhealthy for you.
Here are 3 signs that your work may not be in alignment with your personal values:
1. You feel like you’re walking on eggshells
Are you feeling hyper vigilant? Are you on high alert to avoid making any mistakes or causing any problems? This is you walking on eggshells. This is not sustainable over the long term and creates a built-in systemic anxiety around your work. You can’t really relax into focused work. As you can imagine, this depletes your energy and enjoyment of your work.
2. Work drains your lifeforce
Are your activities outside of work changing or becoming less frequent? When your work is in conflict with your personal values, it takes a lot out of you physically and mentally. It will reduce your capacity to give in other areas of your life. You may do less outside of work or find you need more downtime and can’t handle certain activities or socialising. This is a sure sign that you are over-taxed in your work.
3. You aren’t being your true self at work
Most work environments require us to be a little bit more formal than what we’d be socially, but if you find that you need to repress other aspects of your personality at work, this could be a values clash. Do you disagree with the way certain things are done within the organisation? Do you disagree with the priorities?
If what is important to you needs to be completely set aside when you go to work, this is real values clash.
It means that in order to function and be successful at work, you will need to ignore what is important to you. This is perhaps the situation that is most challenging and draining. If you find yourself in this situation, you must consider changing the situation either from within the organisation or leaving it altogether.
So, could you relate to one of the three situations? At some point in our careers and lives, we’ve all likely experienced one of these scenarios. It is actually an important part of the journey we are on. Learning to recognise when these situations are present will help you to better understand what is and isn’t working for you and to then use that information to guide you in an alternative direction that will ultimately be better for you.