3 Easy Tricks to Help You Fall in Love With Your Job Again

3 Easy Tricks to Help You Fall in Love With Your Job Again Article by Pete WheelanTrying to climb the corporate ladder? Warning It can be a dangerous distraction. Promotions dont always increase your job satisfaction or nurture your passions. In fact, the added responsibility can end up driving you further away from finding meaning in your work because youre too busy to even consider it.Americans in particular are under immense pressure to be chronically busy. Last year, 55 percent of the U.S. workforce left 658 million vacation days unused. If you value advancement but never figure out whether moving up will help you bring your passions to play in what you do, you might lose all sense of purpose. This is not an uncommon herausforderung fewer than 20 percent of leaders of organizations feel passionate about their individual purpose, and many of them cant even articulate what that purpose is.How do you find the passion that can fuel you through distrac tions and an exhausting pace?1. Note How Challenges Make You FeelEven if you love your job, some aspects of it will be difficult or unpleasant.As the saying goes, thats why its called work. You need to figure out how those challenges make you feel. Are the parts you hate the norm or the outliers?Connecting your work to a larger personal goal can help you avoid procrastination or laziness. Finding a job youre so passionate about that every task seems easy isnt a bad idea, but its an awfully high bar to clear. Its important to feel that the obstacles ahead of you are worth overcoming for reasons beyond a paycheck.To gauge how Im feeling about my daily challenges, I use a simple 22 matrix high or low energy and positive or negative mood. High/positive (in the zone) or low/positive (calm and relaxed) are the spaces I want to be in as often as possible. Something I feel highly energetic and positive about is a passion, whereas something I feel highly energetic but negative about is typic ally a major stressor. By consciously assessing patterns that emerge, I can identify the aspects I want to adjust or recalibrate.If youre feeling low energy and negative but need to push through, try my solution I head to an email folder I have labeled Fuel, where I save emails from grateful employees, students, and satisfied customers. These inspire me by reminding me why I do what I do to have a positive, tangible impact on the lives of students by helping them unlock their potential.2. Actively Create Opportunities to ReflectAt the end of each day or each project, evaluate how you feel about the way you spent your time. You probably wont be exuberant and energized every single day, but if you never feel that way or regularly feel frustrated and tired, you could look for a new job or you could draw on a deeper commitment to impact a broader big-picture goal that is deeply and personally meaningful to you.Reflecting in this way will help you see patterns of likes and dislikes, whic h will help you navigate a maze of opportunities to find the kind of future you want for yourself. In one study demonstrating this phenomenon, adults participating in a puzzle-solving game performed 18 percent better than their peers on consecutive attempts when they were given time to reflect on their past performance. This method of reflection has helped me make wiser career pivots.Case in point Over the course of my career, Ive worked for six companies. During three of those five job transitions, I took several months off to reflect on my passions and evaluate whether my next job would align with them. Often, the next opportunity I pursued meant taking a reduction in pay, level of responsibility, or title all things conventional wisdom advises against.When I left my job as a management consultant to start my own company, I traded a big salary, an office, and an executive assistant for working from my apartment with my cofounder unsupported and essentially without pay.By reflecti ng on my purpose, though, I found ways to calibrate my passions with what I would be doing for a living. This understanding allowed me to immerse myself in my work without reservations, even when making a zur seite hin gelegen move. With that kind of enthusiasm, the pay raises and promotions followed naturally.3. Tap Into Your Inner Circle for a Reality CheckAsk your partner, friends or family members for candid feedback about their perceptions of how you feel about your career and what your passions are. What topics do they frequently see you genuinely excited to discuss? When do they see you light up and get into a flow?You might think everything is going fine, but our loved ones are often better at understanding what makes us tick than we are. Take advantage of their years of knowing you to find out whether they see your passions lining up with your work.For example, say you really want to be excited about a promotion you recently earned, but instead youre feeling wary and anxiou s. Your close friends might be able to help you be more honest with yourself and figure out where the disconnect lies.Although you cant change the world or your life every day, by integrating your passions into your work using these strategies, you can consistently take incremental steps in the right direction. If you dedicate yourself to finding your passion and follow it wherever it leads youll never leave your desk at the end of the day wishing things were different.A version of this article originally appeared on SUCCESS.com.Pete Wheelan, CEO of InsideTrack, has dedicated his career to leading mission-driven, high-growth companies focused on helping individuals live up to their full potential. Before joining InsideTrack, he served as chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at Blurb, a groundbreaking leader in unleashing creative expression through self-published books.