Finding Fulfilment At Work
A 6 step process to find more fulfilment and inspiration whilst adding more value at work.
When I started my career as a Business Analyst in 1998, I didn’t really think about concepts such as fulfilment or finding inspiration, I was simply trying to do my work to the satisfaction of my line manager. I was focused on trying to figure it all out and simply do my best with whatever I was asked to do…
However, if I now think back to those days in my early career, I can remember the parts of my role in the team I enjoyed most, best. I can even remember what I was feeling during those parts of my job: excitement, lightness and I felt like I was doing something really valuable for my team.
Sadly many years passed since then where I seldom felt those feelings again. I moved into a new office, a new country and a new work culture and I simply recall those later years as working to achieve some outcome in my life. My feelings of fun, lightness and inspired moments came from the times outside work hours, mostly anyway. My days at work were mostly about me watching the clock until it was “home time”...
The beautiful thing about life, the universe and everything else, is that the yearning for more doesn’t leave you, even when you might be a bit unaware or caught up in your daily grind. It flickers somewhere within you…
As the years passed, my yearning got much stronger to return to those feelings of lightness, inspiration and being able to confidently say I was adding value in my role at work. It took some twisty turns and interesting challenges to learn how to rediscover what really gives me fulfilment and what inspires me but now I know and I want to share those steps with you here.
If you are still reading…
Perhaps you can look at your level of fulfilment and feelings of inspiration at work and see whether you could improve on that to enjoy those feelings of excitement and lightness again in your role at work…
Key steps
There are a few key steps to use to help you rediscover fulfilment or at least the path to a more fulfilled job and I urge you to consider each step carefully. Think about it, mull it over and chew on it. It is worth it in the end, trust me on that.
Step 1: Your job
Many people think that the answer to finding more fulfilment at work is to change jobs. Then once they changed jobs, it takes a few months for them to go through the exact same thought patterns again and repeat the process. It is not always necessary to change jobs to find what might seem as that elusive sense of fulfilment.
However, if you do decide to change jobs due to a low level of job satisfaction, do yourself a favour and make sure you first apply these steps properly before making the decision.
First step is to take inventory of your daily tasks:
Make a list of all the things you do on a daily and weekly basis.
Estimate how much time you spend doing that task every week (out of an average 40 hour work week). Only list items that take 2 hours or more of your time each week.
Rate each item with a score of 1 to 10. (If you love doing that task, make it a 10)
Once you have done this, you can do a few calculations and work out how much of your time you are spending with tasks being scored above 5 out of 10. If you don’t feel like working that out, no worries, just move to step 2.
Step 2: Your top values
The next part of this method is for you to analyse your values and determine your top 3 values. Note that the term “values” in this context doesn’t refer to high-level words such as “family or freedom or fairness” but takes a rather more practical perspective and looks at what are those things that you truly enjoy to do most, what do you find deeply interesting and satisfying and so on. A well-known human behaviouralist, Dr John Demartini came up with 13 practical questions you can ask yourself to kick start your own introspection of what your real-life values are. It is a great tool to identify and clarify what is really important to you.
Guidelines: Make sure you have some time to sit and work through each question and list the answers (at least 3-5 items) for each question. Once you completed the answers to the questions, find the 3 values that keep coming up in your answers and count them. This will quickly give you a good and real reflection of what is really important to you and what you value most.
How do you fill your professional space?
How do you spend your time?
How do you spend your energy?
How do you spend your money?
Where do you have the most order and organization?
Where are you most reliable, disciplined and focused?
What do you think about and what is your inner most dominant thought?
What do you visualise and realise?
What is your internal dialogue?
What do you talk about in social settings?
What inspires you?
What are the most consistent long-term goals you've set?
What do you love to learn about most?
Now that you have a list of your top values, it is time to take a look at your company’s values in a similar light.
Step 3: Your company’s values
The next step is for you to look at your company and the value it brings through different lenses. By asking new questions and considering different aspects of life where your company makes an impact, you can directly influence your own ability to align your top values to that of your company’s.
Normally when I run my virtual Strengths-Goals Workshop, I would ask questions about your company that assess their impact in areas such as: Economic impact (helping create jobs, add value to the economy), Social impact (how do they support the local community for example), Environmental impact, Cultural, Health & Wellbeing, Ethical Contribution, Knowledge and Research and the Global impact. If you spend some time to delve into the depths of the answers to these questions, you will uncover some impacts and contributions they make that you may not have considered before which could potentially also align to your top values.
This step alone can change your attitude and deepen your feelings of alignment dramatically towards your company, increasing your sense of fulfilment in your work.
Step 4: Your strengths
Your strengths are the next important point of analysis that must be assessed with care. This is where you need to consider truthfully to yourself, what you believe are your strengths.
There are two main types of strengths:
Natural Strengths: These are often things you enjoy doing and can do without thinking much about it, it tends to come ‘naturally’ to you. Sometimes it is described as a talent (but not always). During your life, people might comment on your ability to do this particular thing or activity well.
Learned Strengths: These are the types of strengths that you learned to do well. It wasn’t always something you were good at but due to whatever reason, life sent you down a path that required you to become good at this thing. Once something becomes a strength, it is easier for us to do and therefore we often enjoy doing it.
Guidelines: Make a list of all your strengths (try for at least 20 strengths) and then categorise them into “Natural Strength” or “Learned Strength”. If you feel a strength is a bit of both, list it as a “Natural Strength”.
Once you have your list of strengths, I recommend you attempt to prioritise them from strongest strength to weaker strengths. It doesn’t have to be absolutely accurate, just roughly ordered in this way.
Your final step is to take each of your top 10 strengths on the prioritised list and align one (or more) of your top 3 values against it (if relevant).
You will find that often your Natural Strengths aligns well to your top values.
Step 5: Gap Analysis
During this step, the rubber hits the road…
Remember during Step 1 we made a list of all your job activities and you also rated them in terms of how much you enjoyed doing them? Now it is time to take that list, and match your strengths against each job activity.
Do you see that the top rated job activities tends to align well to your natural strengths?
Once you completed this initial part of the Gap Analysis step, you will end up with some job activities that doesn’t have any strengths listed against them and you will find strengths that doesn’t have any job activities listed against them. So these are the gaps.
The key here is for you to identify the top rated job activities which does have strengths aligned to them and work out what % of your time do you spend doing those activities. Then compare that to the % of job activities you do that either doesn’t have any strengths listed against them or have low ranking strengths listed.
This comparison will show you how big the gap is between what you would enjoy doing a lot of and what you are good at versus what you don’t enjoy doing and do not have only a few or no natural strengths or learned strengths aligned to it.
If you find that some of your top strengths are not aligned to any job activities, you need to take note of this and see whether you can find new job activities to include in your goals (Step 6) to create and make part of your daily job.
Step 6: Goals
Now for the kicker of all this analysis: Setting strength focused goals at work.
In order for you to find fulfilment at work and be inspired when you do it, you need to focus on those job activities that aligns closest to your natural strengths and top values. This means that when you set goals with your company manager or even just for yourself, you must focus all your energy on these areas where you find joy and fulfilment.
You must not fall into the trap of trying to set goals for job activities you are not naturally good at and that doesn’t align to your top values! This just creates a neutral, average worker out of you that is not really inspired or of any great value to the company.
You might wonder - who is going to do those tasks I am not good at and don’t enjoy? Well, this is a conversation for you and your manager. Ultimately you must convince your manager that you will add much more value and take more responsibility in the areas where you have natural strengths than those areas you find difficult and unfulfilling to do. They need to consider whether they want a “super star” in their team or “an average Joe”…once they understand the premise of this method and see the dramatically different outcomes it produce, they will have to accept and adopt this as the more meaning strategy for building an inspired and highly valuable workforce.
If your entire team follows this same method and strengths-goals method, your team will naturally balance each other out in terms of work allocation. You might love presenting and facilitating whilst someone else might loath it…this way everyone will do mostly what they are aligned with and are naturally really good at.
Conclusion
Whilst this method is not a magic wand that could change your job responsibilities overnight, it can change your perspective on your job, your potential for having a fulfilling career right where you are today by changing your focus and goals and help you see how you can excel and add heaps more value almost instantly.
If you follow this method diligently and methodically, you will gain insights you never realised before which will help you pivot naturally into a career path of greater fulfilment and joy. It will guide you to make the best decisions about your future career or job direction and it will help you find fulfilment in your every day tasks.
At the end of the day, we are here on this earth to seek growth and we all naturally seek fulfilment. Why not follow a systematic process to achieve both.