How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

6. FIND THE PERSONAL PURPOSE
Earlier in the book, I talked about how we’re more likely to achieve great things
if we’re chasing goals we’ve set for ourselves, rather than those imposed on us
by others. I also pointed out research that suggests a sense of purpose is helpful
in developing the psychological resilience to sail through the ups and downs of
life. So it probably won’t surprise you to know that injecting a touch of personal
purpose can also be a useful pick-me-up when you’re wading through a task that
isn’t delighting you. As in: Why do 
you
(as opposed to your boss or colleagues)
think this work is important? Or at least, why is the 
way
you’re going about it
important to you? Even when you don’t have a lot of space to choose what
you’re doing, the “why” is usually yours to define or interpret in your own way.
Catherine, our executive education director, used this approach when the
division she managed was restructured as part of a larger reorganization of her
company. The restructuring was resulting in many weeks of work that didn’t feel
necessary to her—changing people’s reporting lines, in some cases moving staff

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to new locations, and facilitating the conversations needed between newly
formed teams. “It felt like a big waste of time at first. But it helped me to find
something behind it that I believed in.” It wasn’t easy at first, because she was so
ticked off. “But there 
was
something: I found I did believe in the idea of creating
a more global organization, which was going to be one of the benefits of the
changes we were making—I could see that it would become easier for us to
share best practices between colleagues across the world. That would be a good
thing, because I do ultimately believe that the work of my team makes the world
a slightly better place. That was a big enough idea to fire me up when I started to
feel worn down by it.”
When you need to reconnect your work to the big picture, there are two ways
to do it.
Backward.
Start from what’s meaningful to you and work back to what
you’re doing, like this:
• What do you really care about—values, causes, personal development
goals?
• How does what you’re doing contribute to those values, causes, or goals?
Forward.
Start from what you’re doing, and connect it to what’s meaningful
for you. Ask yourself:
• What is possible as a result of the task you’re doing?
• And what’s ultimately possible as a result of 
that
, for society and/or for
yourself?
Your first answers may be a bit sarcastic if you’re having a bad day (“I’m
enabling that jerk to get all the credit—
that’s
what’s ‘ultimately possible’
”).
Push beyond that, until you get to something that makes you nod rather than
scowl.