Boredom: A symptom of career depression
Posted on September 30, 2013 by Amy McGrath, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
You might be bored because your efforts consistently go unrecognized, but that's not the REAL reason you're unhappy at work.
If you’re feeling bored at work it might be because your efforts have been unrecognized. Let’s take it a step further though. What is the reason behind that? Why are your efforts unrecognized? The answer to that questions is the real reason you’re unhappy at work – or anywhere else for that matter.
In my experience as a mindset coach, the real reason people are unhappy is that their thinking is off track. In other words, your perception of your world is not congruent with what you want to see. Let me explain.
We all want our efforts to be recognized. It usually only takes a couple of instances of perceiving that your work has gone unnoticed to catch your attention and for you to become aware. Once you have the deliberate thought that your efforts are unrecognized, it’s easy to remember past instances of this and find more proof. A pattern has been triggered in which you repetitively see that when you work at something, other people don’t acknowledge it. You begin to expect that your hard work is going to be ignored. So why would you do it? What’s the point if it’s going to be overlooked anyway? The result is that you don’t work hard. You have no incentive. You don’t start challenging projects. Obviously, you’re going to feel bored if you’re not engaged in stimulating work. There is little for others to recognize now – except your utter lack of interest in the job.
If the real reason you’re bored is because your efforts have been unrecognized, then the solution would be to get other people to recognize them. Update people on what you’re doing. Give a presentation about your project. Ask for feedback. Those are fine things to do, and there are times when those strategies will result in the recognition you desire. They won’t work every time though because those strategies depend on the response of others. What happens when other people aren’t really interested in what you’re doing or don’t respond to you or don’t have much to say about your work? Your efforts would still go unrecognized. Now you’ve got a problem with a solution that is out of your control.
The real problem is not that people didn’t recognize your hard work. The real problem is that you wanted to see your efforts be recognized and you didn’t. You didn’t see it. You didn’t perceive it. Your thinking was off track. You didn’t take the time to recognize that you worked hard, and it felt good to meet the challenge. Instead, your thoughts went down another track. They went down the path of focusing on how what you wanted (to be recognized) didn’t exist in your world.
The solution to the problem of misguided thinking is to purposefully direct your thoughts. Anyone can learn the art of deliberate thought. It just takes some time, energy, and commitment to develop the skill of focus. Since you’re the only one with an all access pass to your mind, it’s a solution that is within your control. Once you know how to do it, you’re in the driver’s seat again. Whether or not people recognize your work, you can choose something other than boredom or unhappiness at work. Plus, this strategy, when employed, works every single time.
