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A joy adjacent career means that your work and your life are in balance, not in opposition.

My outlook on life and the approach I take with clients are grounded in one fundamental conviction: you deserve to enjoy your job.

Your work should interest and motivate you. It should be wonderful, enriching, and galvanizing. It should add to your experience as a whole person, not detract from it.

You spend most of your day on the job, so what you do at work should be adjacent to your passions and values.

It should never run counter to the things that nourish, fulfill, and bring you joy.

If you're not jumping up in the morning excited to start the day, then you need to change your job. It is irresponsible not to.

You deserve to enjoy your job.

So how did we let ourselves be convinced that work is something we should merely tolerate?

Look, not all of us want to work in our passion. Cashing in on passion is not for everyone, and many of us prefer to separate our work from our interests and hobbies.

But your work and your interests should complement each other and create the conditions for a fulfilling life.

They should be joy adjacent.

What happens when our work comes into conflict with the activities and values that fulfill us? What should we do when, far from bringing us joy, work drains us, fills us with anxiety as we wake up, leaves us emotionally spent by 5 pm, and starts to encroach on our relationships, our self-image, and our health?

Should we just chalk it up to the cost of doing business? Or shouldn't we think twice about the business we are in?

“What difference does it make, after all,
what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?”
— Seneca
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We have been conditioned to accept that work is supposed to suck.

We look around to see many of our friends and family miserable in their jobs, so we delude ourselves that this is normal, that we are not supposed to like work, that work is something we should tolerate at best and suffer at worst in order to have money to pay for the things we actually do enjoy.

Really? With your one life? Are you ok with that?

Are you ok with giving the vast majority of every day…

…of the vast majority of every week

…of the vast majority of every year

…to something you merely tolerate?

If this sounds like a softball, hippie-dippie, do-gooder approach to ambition and career growth, you're not reading the current business school literature:

 Work *can* be extraordinary.

Study after study after study has concluded that people who like their jobs are more engaged and productive at work. This is so well-documented that it's become a truism: Employees who find purpose in what they do perform far better and stay with their companies far longer.

Simply put, happy employees are better at their jobs.

Because it feels less like work and more like enJOYment.

Companies now invest billions of dollars into creating happy workplaces, whether by hiring six-figure Chief Happiness Officers, catering free lunches, installing foosball tables, or promising unlimited vacation polices, all in an effort to increase retention and keep employees happy.

As well-documented as the research is, it still hasn't hit home for individual employees: you deserve to enjoy the work you do.

Hating your job is irresponsible.

After all, how can you possibly stand to waste your one and only go-'round on this planet on work that does not bring you joy?

Don't be irresponsible. Take action!

 

Ready to get started? Let’s hop on a call!