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Happy Hour is 9 to 5

Learn How To Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt at Work

By Chief Happiness Officer Alexander Kjerulf

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How to make yourself happy at work

There are certainly enough things to choose from. Should you read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Or the Eighth Habit? Maybe the Getting Things Done system is right for you? Is coaching what you need? Maybe some anti-stress training. Or conflict mediation. Career counselling? Or developing your communication skills, your presentation skills or your…

The truth is that your options are almost endless—and most of them are pretty good. But it’s better to start somewhere else, with something even simpler. Start by making yourself happy at work.

This chapter of the book will take your through the necessary steps. The tools provided here are some that I developed for use in our workshops, and they have been used by many people in many different companies.

The exercises work really well—but only if you actually do them. If you just skim through and formulate the answers in your head, it won’t make much of a difference. If you set aside some time to think and write down the answers, new thoughts and ideas may come to you.

Here are the steps you will go through:

1. How happy are you at work?

2. What makes you happy at work?

3. Visualize your goal.

4. Know your why.

5. Decide on happiness.

6. Should I stay or should I go?

7. Make a happy plan.

You can find worksheets for each of the exercises at the book's website at www.positivesharing.com/happyhouris9to5.

How happy are you at work?

This is where the book could have included a 200-question survey that you could fill out, add up your score and go “Yes, I'm 78.4% happy!”. But seriously, you already know how you feel about your job, don't you?

When you consider everything that’s good or bad about your job and the people you work with, I’m betting that you already know well enough which of these three categories you fall into:

• Argh!—I hate my job and would rather walk a mile across burning coals than ever go into work again.

• Meh!¹ —My job is kinda OK. I can take it or leave it. Not too bad, not too good.

• Yay! —I love my job. It’s so great, I would pay to work there. Please don’t tell them I said that last part…

Take a moment to rate your current job. Where are you at, right now?

In most workplace surveys, 10% say they hate their jobs and 10-20% love it. The rest, between 70 and 80% of employees, are somewhere in the middle.

If you’re at Argh I can only advise you to do something about it as soon as humanly possible.

If you’re already at Yay you can still decide to make your job even more enjoyable. Or, even better, choose to spread some of that work happiness to the other people at work.

Meh is dangerous because it’s comfortable. It’s easy to accept a nice, safe, slightly fun, slightly boring, slightly unpleasant job situation. Don’t! I’m deadly serious here. Don’t accept it—push for Yay. When you’re at Meh, you’re only a shadow of what you can be. You’re using only a small fraction of yourself. You’re not infecting people around you with your energy and happiness. You’re not coming home every day with the knowledge that “I rocked!”

Don’t settle for Meh, decide to get to Yay—then figure out what it takes to get there.

What makes you happy at work?

Think back to a situation where you were happy at work. It can be at your current job or at a previous job. It’s important that you think back to a specific situation. Not just, “Man, working for Acme Inc. was great,” but, say, “Man, that time at Acme two years ago where we completed the Hansen project and had a huge party—that was great.” It doesn’t have to be your best work experience ever—just a pretty good one.

This can be surprisingly difficult. Most people have an easier time remembering bad experiences, and thinking back to the good days takes a little work. If you can’t find a single, specific nice experience at work, think back to your school days, or maybe to something you’ve done outside of work, say as a community volunteer, or at your children’s school.

Take your time and find a specific situation where you were happy at work. Write it down. Then find two more and write them down too.

For each of the three good experiences you’ve remembered, write down your answers to each of the questions below. And to make it even more effective you can get together with a friend, and interview each other using the questions. The interviewer asks the questions and writes down the answers, then switch.

Ask these questions for each of your three happy work experiences and write down the answers:

1. What happened? What were the circumstances? Who was involved? What did you do?

2. How was it? What did it feel like? Why was it a good experience?

3. What did it do to the quality of your work?

4. How were your relations with co-workers, customers, suppliers and/or others at work?

5. How did it affect you outside of work?

6. Write down at least five things that made this experience possible. Which people, values, practices, tools, etc., were involved and helped make this great experience happen?

7. Write down at least five things from this experience that would you like to have more of in the future to make you happier at work.

What you’ve just done is an exercise based on Appreciative Inquiry, an excellent tool based on the idea that the best way to create positive change is to focus on what worked previously and what you want more of in the future, rather than on all the earlier problems you want to avoid. This exercise is great for a number of reasons:

1: You remember previous good experiences at work

It’s so easy to think back to that lousy boss you had three years ago, but surprisingly difficult to think back to that great team you worked with last year. Most of us tend to take good experiences for granted and to focus more on problems, annoying people and negative situations. This exercise trains your ability to also remember good experiences—an ability that is crucial if you want to be happy at work.

2: You dig up real-life experiences

When you examine the question, “What makes me happy at work?”, it’s tempting to make a long list of all the traditional trappings of a good job. You know the kind of thing: a raise, a promotion, a bonus, etc. These are things we have been taught to strive for—not necessarily the things that will really make us happy.

This exercise avoids that trap because it looks back to specific situations where you were happy. These things are highly likely to work again in the future.

3: It’s fun and energizing

It may be difficult at first, but it’s also a lot of fun to think back to the good experiences at work. Thinking back only to the bad experiences makes you feel sad and powerless. Thinking back to the good stuff gives you more energy and confidence in a positive work future.

4: You focus on what you want—not what you want to avoid

You can’t choose your future work life based on what you want to avoid, because:

• We tend to get more of what we focus on. If we focus on the things we want to avoid, we unfortunately tend to get more of those.

• There are an almost infinite number of things to avoid at work. You can always add more to the list. Finding out what will make you happy is much easier and more manageable.

• Even if you managed to avoid all the things that make you unhappy at work, that still doesn’t mean you’ll be happy—it only means you won’t be unhappy. In other words, avoiding the bad stuff can take you to Meh, but no further. To go to Yay you need to look at what makes you happy at work.

The next step is to figure out what work and life will be like once you reach your goal and become happy at work.

Visualize your goal

In this exercise you will visualize what a working day is like when you’re happy at work. This exercise is important for three reasons:

1. Knowing what your goal will look, sound and feel like gives you a specific target to aim for.

2. Knowing just how great achieving your goal will feel gives you the energy to take action.

3. You focus on what you want to achieve (not on what you want to avoid), which programs your subconscious mind to achieve it.

Imagine you’re at Yay—you really, really love your job. It makes you grow, it lets you learn, it gives you victories and challenges in the right measure. You wake up in the morning totally fired up about work. You don’t hit that snooze button on your alarm clock five times in a row because you’re just too excited about the workday ahead of you.

You have a great boss and great co-workers. Your job is interesting and fun. Every morning you come in excited; every afternoon you leave proud. You make a difference working at something meaningful. You help people around you. You are appreciated both for what you do and for who you are. Your customers love you and rave about you.

Imagine feeling this amazingly good about your work. Really put yourself there, and feel what you would feel in this situation. Now answer the following questions, as if you’re already totally happy at work.

1. When you get up in the morning, how do you feel? What emotions do you have?

2. What are you thinking on your way to work?

3. As you walk in the door at work, what feeling comes over you?

4. When you greet your co-workers, what does your voice sound like? What do their voices sound like?

5. What expressions are on their faces? On your face?

6. What does your workplace sound like? Which sounds dominate?

7. You run into a problem at work. How do you react?

8. You have a disagreement with a co-worker. How do you handle it?

9. Your boss drops by to greet you as you work. What does their voice sound like? What is the expression on their face? How do you feel after your boss dropped by?

10. A co-worker asks for your help. How do you respond?

11. Your team does some amazingly great work. How do you feel? How do you celebrate it?

12. When you get home from work, how do you feel? How does your body feel?

13. What do you think about your next workday?

There’s a worksheet for this exercise at the book's website, and you can also download an mp3 file containing this exercise.

Know your why

The next step is to ask yourself why your life at and outside of work will be better once you’re happy at work. I’m sure that if you take a good look, it’s clear that being happy at work will improve your life immensely. Knowing this will give you the motivation to take action.

To find your why, ask yourself the following questions and write down your answers:

If I was totally happy at work, what would be different about:

1. My working day

2. My relations with co-workers

3. My relations with customers

4. My productivity

5. My motivation

6. My relations with my manager

7. My relations with my employees (if you have any)

8. My career

9. My financial situation

10. My life outside of work

11. Stress and pressure

12. My health and wellness

13. My relations with family and friends

Take a look at your answers. How is life different when you’re totally happy at work? A little better? A lot better?

Knowing your goal, and why that goal is worth reaching, leaves you with one very basic choice to consider.

Decide on happiness

Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manners of unforeseen incidents and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

—William Murray, member of a Scottish expedition to Mount Everest

On Page 37 I claimed that happiness at work starts with a choice: Before you can make any significant progress you must decide to be happy.

Don’t get me wrong—deciding to be happy won’t magically make you happy. That decision is the first step.

And also remember that you’re not choosing to be satisfied. You’re not going for an OK work life. You’re going for irrational, exhuberant, wild-eyed, magnificent levels of happiness at work. You’re choosing Yay, not Meh.

That is the choice before you now. Now that you know how happy you already are at work, what it takes to make you happy, and what your life is like when you’re at Yay—will you decide to be happy at work?

Before you make that choice, remember that every decision has consequences. Choosing to be happy also means doing what it takes to get there.

If your current work situation is not good, you face the most difficult decision…

Should I stay or should I go?

Michael felt stuck in a job he hated. Being the sales manager of an IT company may sound nice, but the reality for this father of two was stress, conflict, backstabbing, internal competition and tons of overwork.

Michael really wanted to get out but couldn’t see how. His salary was great and his economic situation was just too tight. Even with his wife also working, they still only barely managed to make the payments on their house and cars. Saving up for an annual family holiday was a struggle every year and they lived in constant fear of large, unforeseen expenses.

Finally, one office power struggle became too much and Michael quit his job in disgust. He found a new job at a much nicer company, but at only half the salary and only after a few months of making no money. The family took stock of their new situation, and a depressing fact became clear: They could not afford to keep the house. After some deliberation they sold it and moved into a much smaller appartment.

A year later, Michael looked back and had this to say: “Quitting that job is the best thing I’ve ever done for my family and myself, and my only regret is that I didn’t do it much sooner. It’s true that I used to come home to a nice, big house in the suburbs. But it’s also true that I usually came home too tired to play with my sons and too stressed and angry to talk to my wife.

“Now I come home at a reasonable hour, happy, relaxed and ready to enjoy family life. The kids may not love having to share a room where before they each had their own, but let me tell you this: No one in this family would trade our current situation for what we had a year ago.”

Once you’ve decided to be happy at work, here’s the most basic choice you must make: Should you try to become happy in your current job, or is it better to switch to a new job? Can you make things better where you are? Have you tried? How did it go?

There are two possible options:

1. Change is realistic. It may not be easy or fast, but things can get better at my current job.

2. Change is not realistic. The culture is too fixed or change will simply be too hard.

I’m not trying to convince you to switch jobs, and I’m not trying to convince you to stay. What I am trying to do is convince you to choose. Choose to stay where you are and make that work situation happy. Or, choose to leave and do something about it. As the philosophers say, the greatest pain is not in making one choice over another, but in not choosing at all.

Can you make changes to your current job? Remember that:

• You may not need to change the whole company. Improving the mood in your own team or department may be all that’s needed.

• Often we think change is impossible, but we’re simply underestimating our own ability to make a difference. Remember the story of the nurses at H4 from Chapter 8.

• There is no such thing as “A Dream Job”—any job is as good as you make it.

Only you can know the truth of your situation, and the important thing is to give your current job a chance to make you happy, but not to break yourself trying to change the unchangeable.

Switching jobs can be a scary proposition, but for many people it’s the only way they will ever be happy at work. If you decide that there is only a small chance that your current job will ever make you happy, I urge you to move on as quickly as possible. This is a decision with serious consequences, including loss of identity, prestige and financial security. Again, only you can make that choice.

If you decide to switch jobs, the other exercises in this chapter have given you a list of things to look for in your next job and a list of reasons why switching is a good thing for you. Use these results to give yourself the momentum towards a new work situation with much more happiness.

It is frighteningly easy to stay in an unhappy work situation simply for the salary and the stability. Many people do this year after year. The worst part is that the longer you put up with an unhappy job, the easier it gets to to live with, the harder it gets to remember how much fun work can be and the harder it gets to move on and do something about it.

If you decide that you probably can’t be happy in your current job, do something about it as soon as possible. On Page 133 there were some tips on how you can reduce the fear associated with losing your job.

Make a happy plan

It’s time to make a plan. But not your typical plan—let’s make a plan that actually works. We’ll do that in Chapter 11.

Go to list of chapters

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