Grandma Henke

Like happiness?   Here’s another great blog … “The Happiness Project“.      It’s written by Gretchen Rubin who once worked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as a clerk.    She left that to write and the book she’s currently working on is called “The Happiness Project” … thus the blog.    She has done a lot of research on what makes different people happy in various settings and stations in life.   I find her writing very fascinating and uplifting.

Which of these four work categories describes you?   This particular blog was especially interesting to me because I felt the job I held for twenty years started out as a “calling”.      It started out that way but after about 15 years the fun part of the job was drowning in the administrative problems of having government contracts with lots of hoops to jump through and not enough money to pay the staff a fair wage.    I eventually took an early retirement because I was totally burned out.   I think when you feel your job is a calling it is easy to burn out, particularly in the low paying service field.  You feel obligated to see it through and it is very difficult to quit and walk away.

The other reason this blog was interesting is because my son, Warren, and I were talking about work today and how when you have personal goals and direction and can see why your job is necessary to reach those goals it is much easier to stick with something that you might not have chosen but isn’t really all that bad.     You can make it workable if other factors make it good, like hours, how far it is from home, benefits etc.   

The happiness we find in our jobs, or in any part of life, is personal.   We don’t have the same motivation, the same needs.   What makes work difficult at times is when you work one job and have a “calling” that is going unanswered.    So … it pays to figure out a plan that you can work on that calling somehow while you do what you have to do … goals and plans do help.

Anyway, read the blog for yourself … I think you’ll enjoy it.

Another good blog of hers is This Wednesday — Quiz: How mindful are you? I’m not very.

I found myself in the similar position as the author … checking off too many questions that turned me into not being very mindful.    After reading this article I am going to make a concerted effort to do it … be more mindful … smell the roses so to speak.   I noticed this about myself particularly last month when I was spending so much hard hours at editing my book and then lost hours worth of editing.     If I take these two blogs and combine them I can see that I was making my “calling” something that once again I could burnout on if I wasn’t careful.    I need to be more mindful of the joy of getting places than so much of my focus being on the finished product.    I need to be more mindful.

Read this blog.   You’ll enjoy it!

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