You Gotta Love What You Do

May 2021

Do you love the work you do? When you first wake up in the morning and wonder what day of the week it is, are you excited to realize it is a workday and you will have yet another wonderful opportunity to spend your day doing something you really love?

If that scenario does not define your typical wake-up experience, then why do you do what you do for a living? Why do you work in this organization? Unless you have a committed obligation in the military, there must be a multitude of ways to earn a satisfying living that you might love and enjoy.

In my last HerSpectives blog post, I presented a unique question I had recently been asked and promised to answer in a four-part series of posts: “If you had to sum up your personal leadership philosophy in just for words, what would those four words be?”

Today I will share the second of the four words that have served as my philosophical guiding stars throughout my leadership career. My second descriptive word is Love. 

I covered Do You Really Love What You Do? in my June 2020 blog post. It may seem a bit redundant to discuss this topic yet again but loving what you do really is that important.

Because life has a way of changing on us when we least expect it, we need to keep asking ourselves, “Am I still having fun and loving what I’m doing?” If the answer is no, then it is time to take a step back, re-evaluate your situation, and consider making a change. 

Life is simply too short not to love what you do and do what you love. In all my decades of working, either for pay or just for the fun of it, I have found that doing what I love gives me energy. “Work” is a joy. The hours fly by. I feel worthy, happy, and fulfilled. Life has meaning.

When you love what you do, by the end of the day you still have as much energy as when you started.  On the flip side, doing things you do not love and enjoy is energy draining and a waste of your precious time.

I had an interesting conversation about this with Jodi Berg, President and CEO of the Vita-Mix Corporation, while interviewing her for my upcoming book, Women on Top: What’s Holding You Back from Executive Leadership?  Jodi shared this about doing what you love:

If there is something you do well, you love to do it and it gives you energy, it is most likely a superpower.  On the other hand, there may be things we are really good at that are not necessarily superpowers. For example, I can read financial reports right up there with the best of them, yet it gives me no energy. It’s more like kryptonite—it sucks the energy right out of me.

If you can identify those superpowers that give you energy, then you can focus your day on spending as much time as possible enacting your superpowers. If you focus your time on using your superpowers, by the end of the day, when you go home, you have more energy than when you started. At the very least, you didn’t use up all of your energy at work, so you don’t go home completely depleted of energy.

Face it. If you do not love what you are doing for a living, if you are not thrilled with your contributions, chances are you will be a drag on those around you and you will cause disappointment to those you serve. 

If you like where you work, but you do not love the responsibilities assigned to you, and if you are not a manager, then do some investigating to determine if any of your peers might love to do those tasks that are like kryptonite to you. Then have a heart-to-heart conversation with your manager. Propose that if you and your peer(s) traded some of your job responsibilities, the entire team might be more inspired and productive. It could be an infinite-win.

If you are a manager and do not love some of the responsibilities assigned to you, delegate those tasks to one or more team members who might love to do such things. That way, they can better leverage their strengths and grow their skills. You just might help someone develop a new superpower that will take your entire organization to new heights.

As a leader, if you want to create a Best Place to Work culture—and who does not want to be part of a Best Place to Work? —it is important to encourage those around you, whether they report to you or not, to do what they love. That is how leaders inspire WOW factor results. 

If you read my first book, The WOW Factor Workplace: How to Create a Best Place to Work Culture, you already know WOW factor workplaces are those where team members enthusiastically tell their friends and family, “I am so lucky to have such an amazing manager. I work with the best team. I love my job. I’d never want to work anywhere else!” 

And one more thing about that word, Love: Strive to love something about everyone you work with, even if, on the surface, some of them do not seem all that loveable. If you can find just one thing to love about each one of them, even if it is just their punctuality, or their dedication to attending their kids’ afterschool sports events, then tell them so. You never know. You might just change their life.

You might even change your own life by doing so. Don’t you love it?