When you are young and just starting in your career, having passion and excitement for your job is quite easy to muster. It is like starting with a blank page where so many possibilities and opportunities are waiting to be discovered. There is a natural energy that makes you want to get up daily, ready to be productive and prove your worth.
When you reach past 40, however, you may experience a bit of slowdown. Your energy may not be as high as before. You may find late night overtime work a stretch. Your eyesight starts to falter and you may even experience a few health issues. You’ve got other priorities now and family responsibilities to worry about. Or you may have even reached your goals with outstanding achievements already and you start asking, “What now?”
During these moments, it is easy to lose a bit of steam. What was once exciting work may not seem as interesting anymore and eventually, you start losing a bit of passion for your work.
Yet you know deep inside that loving what you do is an important ingredient to being happy and productive in life. And if you care enough, you would want to get back your mojo. So when you’ve lost a bit of steam, how do you get that passion back? How do you get excited again? How can you reignite your passion for work?
I believe re-igniting your passion for work is a personal journey. You and only you alone can transform how you feel about your life and what you do. Nothing anyone says or does can change what you feel unless you allow it. Change can only happen if you open your heart to it.
But if you want to take charge and recharge yourself, let me offer a few suggestions to help you reignite your passion for work. I oftentimes go through these “low batt” moments myself and I find these things helpful in getting me back on track to living and working more fully.
Take Time to Recharge
Like our cell phone batteries, everyone loses energy regularly. So it is beneficial to carve out some time to recharge. Having sufficient sleep and regular exercise will help you recharge daily, but doing extra-curricular activities like pursuing your hobbies, taking vacations or engaging in sports, yoga or zumba—anything you enjoy, just for the fun of it, will boost your energy and get you feeling refreshed in no time.
Learn Something New
When work starts feeling like a routine and you start thinking that after all these years at it, you pretty much know everything there is to know about your field of work, I find that attending a seminar where you can learn from the trainer and interact with other participants can be quite inspiring. Even if you think you know everything, you will be surprised to learn from other people’s experiences and perspectives. Learning something new allows you to see things differently and find ways to improve your job.
Delegate Low Interest Tasks
In our jobs, we all have tasks that we like to do and tasks that we do not necessarily enjoy. If you can afford to assign uninteresting tasks to others or even outsource them, consider doing that. But do try to find people who actually enjoy doing the tasks that you don’t like. This way, you can focus on doing things that you like and be more productive at it and the other person will not be burdened either.
Check Out the Competition
Nothing can get your blood boiling than seeing your competition getting ahead of you. When you are feeling a little bit disengaged with your work, check out your competition. Find out how they are doing and compare. If you are in a rut, seeing your competition in action can rile you up.
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
When you are a creature of comfort like me, you tend to prefer doing things that come easy. As a result, you start to get too comfortable and complacency sets in. You become lazy and eventually, you will get bored. But if you allow yourself to feel discomfort, if you challenge yourself again to face your fears, you will feel more alive. You will then start letting yourself feel more passion.
Rediscover Your Purpose
When you are working for quite a while, you will sometimes forget why you are doing what you do. If this happens, stop. Take some time to recall why you chose your career. What are the things you have accomplished and what are you proud of the most. Remember the times when you were just starting. Remember your youth and your passion. Hopefully, this will make you rediscover your purpose in life.
Set New Goals to Achieve
If you have successfully achieved pretty much what you have set out to do and are in that stage where you are asking, “Know what?” Congratulations for achieving your dreams. But do not stop and rest on your laurels. Set new goals for yourself, for your family or your community. By setting new goals, you get to reset yourself and find new purpose. This will give you something to look forward to. It will bring your passion back.
Losing steam can naturally happen to anyone who has worked for quite a while, whether you are young or old. But we all have the means to reignite our passion, if you just open your mind and heart to it.