Is Your Job Worthy of Greatness and Respect?

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Are certain jobs more worthy of respect? Must you like your job in order to do it well? Does your job determine your self-worth? Read this month’s newsletter as we address these interesting questions.

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All of us at Insight Principles

Is Your Job Worthy of Greatness and Respect?

Recently I read an article in Forbes Magazine. (Click here for the complete article ) The author was dismayed by what she describes as a lack of respect for certain less glamorous jobs. She makes the point that all honest work is something to be proud of.

She writes that even if you don’t have your dream job, you can bring respect and greatness to the role. Here’s her advice:

• Do everything with greatness.
• Value the commitment you’ve made to others, regardless of how they ‘show up.’
• Do the work for your own self-worth, instead of a pat on the back.
• Look inwards—not outwards—for validation.
• Practice your greatness, whether you love your job or not.

I was impressed with the wisdom in her advice. I’d like to explain how everything on her list is actually an implication of the design of the human mind. While advice can be helpful, when you see the underlying design of the mind, what to do becomes obvious. Advice is no longer required.

When you realize that you are living in the experience and feeling of your thinking, you find it matters what you think about the work you do. If you think your job is beneath you, you will will feel that thinking. Enjoyment and job satisfaction will elude you – not because of the job but because of your thinking about the job.

It’s common to complain about others’ poor performance and let’s face it, some people don’t follow through. But using the performance of others as the reason you don’t commit fully to your own work is forgetting how the system works. Another person’s performance can not make you think in a certain way. That’s between you and you.

Self-worth and validation come from the inside and are born of thought. Without thought, you can not accept validation from others or feel worthy or unworthy. This is such good news for humanity. There are no external strings controlling your feelings about yourself.

Does it seem odd that you could bring greatness to a job you do not like? My parents believed that liking or not liking a job was completely irrelevant. Any job that needed to be done should be done well. I did not appreciate their philosophy when I was a kid but I do see its merit today. They may not have had an exact understanding of how the human mind worked, but they had a lot of common sense.

Does this mean you should stay in a job no matter what? Of course not. It simply means that no job can give you feelings of self-worth or satisfaction or enjoyment without your thinking being involved. When you recognize this, you tend to keep your inner balance in spite of what may be happening on the job. You do well in the present moment and you make good decisions about the future.

“Too often we assume the job is what determines our greatness. It is not. We determine the level of greatness we bring to what we do.”

The article’s author makes a good point in the quote above. I would tweak it a bit.

Remember, your job (and your life) is always an “inside job” and will always be between you and you.

Sandy Krot