Top 10 Ways to Be Happy at Work

Working at Google sounds very cool. I'd be the first to tout Google as a motivating employer: free food, engineers who are enabled to spend 20 percent of their time on their own projects, and a work environment that fosters play and creative thinking. At Google, Genentech and other Fortune magazine top 100 companies, employers provide the best workplaces. At the same time, perks that enable employees to spend all of their time at work exploit people and destroy work - life balance. So, even the best employer may not be best for everyone. These are the factors that will help you find happiness at work.

1. Choose to Be Happy at Work

Happiness is largely a choice. I can hear many of you arguing with me, but it's true. You can choose to be happy at work. Sound simple? Yes. But, simplicity is often profoundly difficult to put into action. I wish all of you had the best employer in the world, but, face it, you may not. So, think positively about your work. Dwell on the aspects of your work you like. Avoid negative people and gossip. Find coworkers you like and enjoy and spend your time with them. Your choices at work largely define your experience. You can choose to be happy at work.

• How to Make Your Current Job Work

2. Do Something You Love Every Single Day

You may or may not love your current job and you may or may not believe that you can find something in your current job to love, but you can. Trust me. Take a look at yourself, your skills and interests, and find something that you can enjoy doing every day. If you do something you love every single day, your current job won't seem so bad. Of course, you can always make your current job work or decide that it is time to quit your job.

3. Take Charge of Your Own Professional and Personal Development

A young employee complained to me recently that she wanted to change jobs because her boss was not doing enough to help her develop professionally. I asked her whom she thought was the person most interested in her development. The answer, of course, was her. You are the person with the most to gain from continuing to develop professionally. Take charge of your own growth; ask for specific and meaningful help from your boss, but march to the music of your personally developed plan and goals. You have the most to gain from growing - and the most to lose, if you stand still.

4. Take Responsibility for Knowing What Is Happening at Work

People complain to me daily that they don't receive enough communication and information about what is happening with their company, their department's projects, or their coworkers. Passive vessels, they wait for the boss to fill them up with knowledge. And, the knowledge rarely comes. Why? Because the boss is busy doing her job and she doesn't know what you don't know. Seek out the information you need to work effectively. Develop an information network and use it. Assertively request a weekly meeting with your boss and ask questions to learn. You are in charge of the information you receive.

5. Ask for Feedback Frequently

Have you made statements such as, "My boss never gives me any feedback, so I never know how I'm doing." Face it, you really know exactly how you're doing. Especially if you feel positively about your performance, you just want to hear him acknowledge you. If you're not positive about your work, think about improving and making a sincere contribution. Then, ask your boss for feedback. Tell him you'd really like to hear his assessment of your work. Talk to your customers, too; if you're serving them well, their feedback is affirming. You are responsible for your own development. Everything else you get is gravy.

6. Make Only Commitments You Can Keep

One of the most serious causes of work stress and unhappiness is failing to keep commitments. Many employees spend more time making excuses for failing to keep a commitment, and worrying about the consequences of not keeping a commitment, than they do performing the tasks promised. Create a system of organization and planning that enables you to assess your ability to complete a requested commitment. Don't volunteer if you don't have time. If your workload is exceeding your available time and energy, make a comprehensive plan to ask the boss for help and resources. Don't wallow in the swamp of unkept promises.

7. Avoid Negativity

Choosing to be happy at work means avoiding negative conversations, gossip, and unhappy people as much as possible. No matter how positively you feel, negative people have a profound impact on your psyche. Don't let the negative Neds and Nellies bring you down. Take a look at:

• How to Deal With a Negative Coworker: Negativity Matters.
• Dealing With Difficult People at Work.

And, keep on singing in the car on your way to work - or start.

8. Practice Professional Courage

If you are like most people, you don't like conflict. And the reason why is simple. You've never been trained to participate in meaningful conflict, so you likely think of conflict as scary, harmful, and hurtful. Conflict can be all three; done well, conflict can also help you accomplish your work mission and your personal vision. Conflict can help you serve customers and create successful products. Happy people accomplish their purpose for working. Why let a little professional courage keep you from achieving your goals and dreams? Make conflict your friend.

9. Make Friends

In their landmark book, First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (Compare Prices), Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman list twelve important questions. When employees answered these questions positively, their responses were true indicators of whether people were happy and motivated at work. One of these key questions was, "Do you have a best friend at work?" Liking and enjoying your coworkers are hallmarks of a positive, happy work experience. Take time to get to know them. You might actually like and enjoy them. Your network provides support, resources, sharing, and caring.

10. If All Else Fails, Job Searching Will Make You Smile

If all of these ideas aren't making you happy at work, it's time to reevaluate your employer, your job, or your entire career. You don't want to spend your life doing work you hate in an unfriendly work environment. Most work environments don't change all that much. But unhappy employees tend to grow even more disgruntled. You can secretly smile while you spend all of your non-work time job searching. It will only be a matter of time until you can quit your job - with a big smile.

 

So happiness - isn't that the thing that all of us strive to find and keep? Nobody is happy all of the time, but some people are definitely more fulfilled than others. Studies on what makes people happy reveal that it doesn't have much to do with material goods or high achievement; it seems to whittle down to your outlook on life, and the quality of your relationships with the people around you.

Steps:

1. Be optimistic. In the 1970s, researchers followed people who'd won the lottery and found that a year after they'd hit the jackpot, they were no happier than the people who didn't. They called it hedonic adaptation, which suggests that we each have a baseline level of happiness. No matter what happens, good or bad, the effect on our happiness is only temporary and we tend to rebound to our baseline level. Some people have a higher baseline happiness level than others, and that can be attributed in part to genetics, but it's also largely influenced by how you think. So while the remainder of this article will help boost your happiness, only improving your attitude towards life will increase your happiness permanently. Here are some excellent starting points for doing that:

• How to Be Optimistic
• How to Be Laid Back
• How to Live in the Moment

2. Follow your gut. In one study, two groups of people were asked to pick out a poster to take home. One group was asked to analyze their decision carefully, weighing the pros and cons, and the other group was told to listen to their gut. Two weeks later, the group that followed their gut was happier with their posters than the group that analyzed their decisions.Now, some of our decisions are more crucial than picking out posters, but by the time you're poring over your choice, the options you're weighing are probably very similar, and the difference will only temporarily affect your happiness. So next time you have a decision to make, and you're down to two or three options, just pick the one that feels right, and go with it. Never regret the decisions you make though. Just live by the 3 C's of life: choices chances, and changes. You need to make a choice to take a chance or your life will never change.

• How to Follow Your Intuition
• How to Stop Hesitating

3. Make enough money to meet your basic needs: food, shelter, and clothing. In the US, that magic number is $40,000 a year. Any money you make beyond that will not necessarily make you happier. Remember the lottery winners mentioned earlier? Oodles of money didn't make them any happier. Once you make enough money to support your basic needs, your happiness is not significantly affected by how much money you make, but by your level of optimism.

• Your comfort may increase with your salary, but comfort isn't what makes people happy. It makes people bored. That's why it's important to push beyond your comfort zone to fuel your growth as a person.

4. Stay close to friends and family: Or move to where other members are- so you can see them more. We live in a mobile society, where people follow jobs around the country and sometimes around the world. We do this because we think increases in salary will make us happier, but the fact is that our relationships with our friends and family have a far greater impact on our happiness than our jobs do. So next time you think about relocating, consider that you'd need a salary increase of over $100,000 USD to compensate for the loss of happiness you'd have from moving away from your friends and family. But if your relationships with your family and friends are unhealthy or nonexistent, and you are bent on moving, choose a location where you'll be making about the same amount of money as everyone else; according to research, people feel more financially secure (and happier) when they're on similar financial footing as the people around them, regardless of what that footing is.

5. Have deep, meaningful conversations. A study by a psychologist at the University of Arizona has shown that spending less time participating in small talk and more time having deep, meaningful conversations can lead to an increased feeling of happiness.

6. Find happiness in the job you have now: Many people expect the right job or the right career to dramatically change their level of happiness, but happiness research makes it clear that your level of optimism and the quality of your relationships eclipse the satisfaction you gain from your job. If you have a positive outlook, you will make the best of any job, and if you have good relationships with people, you won't depend on your job to give your life a greater sense of meaning. You'll find it in your interactions with the people you care about. Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't aspire towards a job that will make you happier; it means you should understand that the capacity of your job to make you happy is quite small in comparison to your outlook on life and your relationships with people.

7. Smile: Science suggests that when you smile, whether you feel happy or not, your mood will be elevated.  So smile all the time! In addition, having enough money to pay the bills allows you to focus your energies on more productive aspects of your life, such a the pursuit of happiness as opposed to keeping the 'wolves from the door'.

• See How to Smile to Be Happy.
• See How to Smile for Better Health.

 8. Forgive: In a study of college students, it was found that an attitude of forgiveness contributed to better cardiovascular health. You could say that forgiveness literally heals your heart. While it is unknown how forgiveness directly affects your heart, the study suggests that it may lower the perception of stress.

9. Make friends who share your interests or faith: In a 2010 study by Harvard researchers published in the journal American Sociological Review, it was discovered that people who went to church regularly reported greater life satisfaction than those who didn't. The critical factor was the quality of friendships made in church. People who went to church and didn't have any close friends there were no happier than people who never went to church. When the researchers compared people who had the same number of close friends, the ones who had close friends from church were more satisfied with their lives. It's thought that the forming of friendships based on mutual interests and beliefs (and meeting consistently based on that mutual bond) is what makes the difference, so if church itself is not your thing, consider finding something else you're deeply passionate about and making friends who you can connect with regularly based on that.

Video:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BUnQg-K-RIw#! 

Tips

• Just because something seems to make other people happy doesn't mean that it really does. People are very good at pretending they're happy, especially when they've invested so much into the things that are supposed to make them happy; it's hard to admit that you've been placing all your eggs in the wrong basket.
• When you're purposely trying to be happy or cheerful, but just can't seem to achieve it at the moment, do something crazy. It's stupid, crazy, weird stuff like that that seems pointless, but could actually lift your mood after you do it, just because you're glad you did it. Most fundamentally, recognize that happiness is a state of mind and not something which can be defined objectively. You can change your state of mind in many ways including these suggestions:
  • Turn your favorite music up loud and do a stupid dance to it. Talk to yourself in the mirror.
  • Try a new food.
  • Rearrange your room in a weird way.
  • Write a funny or inspiring quote on your mirror/wall/locker.
  • Scream as loud as you can (warn your family first!) and bounce up and down; jump all around.
  • Get your swimsuit on, go outside and turn the hose on yourself, if it's a hot day.
• If you have a child, either now or in the future, tell them often how much you love and admire him/her and do anything to help him/her.
• Keep in close touch with relatives and a small circle of friends. You can't beat their love and support.
• Don't be afraid to admit when you're down and need a lift. Conversely, if there's a person in your life who is a negative influence and who is dragging you down in some way, don't be afraid to remove such a person from your life.