266. Finding Happiness in Your Career with Minda Zetlin

Minda Zetlin is an author, speaker, journalist, and contributing editor at Inc. where she writes the Laid Back Leader column. Her articles and workshops provide research-backed advice to help ambitious people get the most out of their careers and their lives.

In her newest book, Career Self-Care: Find Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work, she lays out concrete examples of how to improve the quality of your work life no matter what career you’re in. This has come to the forefront of our attention over the last few years for obvious reasons.

Employee satisfaction was at a record low even before the pandemic. As the economy starts to shift, it remains to be seen whether or not employers continue to give employee wellness the attention it deserves or begin cutting costs. But people who are happy and comfortable at work and at home do better work, and so it behooves us all to keep pushing for a better quality of life.

Whether you’re working from home or still in an office, the line between work and home is continuing to blur—you likely have a smartphone with you at work or a desk at home where you do some work away from the office. It’s vital that when we’re working, no matter where it is, we need to set up practices that create clear boundaries and delineations between our work life and our home life.

The book is full of exercises to move towards your goals, increase your happiness at work, and improve your mindfulness, but Minda offers us one very clear piece of advice: If you are unhappy at work, don’t sit around and do nothing about it.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“It’s your job to make yourself happy. And I mean that really seriously. Not just in the sense that you’ve got to make yourself happy because no one else will, although that’s actually true. Even the people who love you the best can’t really figure out how to make you happy, you’re the one who knows that. But also because it’s your responsibility, if you can, to the world and to the people around you, to be as happy as you can be. My ASJA colleague Gretchen Rubin has all kinds of research showing that happy people not only work better, but they’re also more likely to volunteer, they’re more likely to contribute to charity, and they are better members of society in every possible way. In every possible way, if you are happier, everyone is happier and you are better in the world. So it’s your job to figure out how to be happy and go make it happen.”

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Resources:

• mindazetlin.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mindazetlin
• Twitter: @MindaZetlin
• Read: Career Self-Care