Work Life Relationship Assessment Challenge
Make 2025 the year to improve your relationship with your work life.
The beginning of a new year is a great time to reflect on how your relationship with your work is going. It may feel strange to think about having “a relationship” with your job. But just like any relationship, your relationship with work can go through periods of ups and downs, and get a little stale if not given attention.
As we move into 2025, it is a great time to do a “checkup” on how your work relationship is going.
Consider how you answer these questions about your work:
Do you mostly enjoy your work?
Do you mostly feel fulfilled about the work you do?
Do you mostly feel valued and supported?
Do you mostly like working with your colleagues/supervisors?
Do you mostly look forward to being at work?
Do you mostly feel that you are good at your job?
Do you mostly use your best skills and strengths?
Do you mostly stop thinking about work when you are not working?
The more you answered “No” to these questions, the more that it may be time to see what needs to change in your work relationship.
Think about the reasons your relationship with work might be floundering.
Do you dread the start of the workday?
Do you fear that you don’t really know what you are doing?
Do certain people at work drive you crazy?
Do you dislike the day-to-day work tasks?
Do you have too much work on your plate?
While a million factors can influence your work relationship, three big ones are: how your job makes you feel, the people you work with, and the actual work tasks.
Work and Feelings
When your work life is generally good, it creates positive emotions that spill over into the other parts of your life. You have the energy to focus on what is important to you: your family, pets, exercise, hobbies, volunteering, etc. If most of the time you feel good about your work, the people you work with, and how well you are doing the job, you don’t have to think about work when you are not working.
But, when your relationship with your work life is not going well, those negative feelings spill over, making it harder to relax and enjoy your nonwork time. If you experience the “Sunday scaries” and dread going to work on Monday, you might find it harder to be fully present for the important people in your life over the weekend. If those “imposter feelings” creep up at work every day and you fear that people will discover you have no idea what you are doing, it might be impossible to unwind at the end of the day.
Work and People
The people you work with can make or break your enjoyment of the job. Most jobs require that you work with other people in some capacity. Even if you work remotely, you might still have important relationships with clients, supervisors, coworkers, direct reports, customers, vendors, students, and administrators.
Difficult coworkers or supervisors can create work environments that feel toxic and unsafe. Often, when clients tell me they are thinking of leaving their jobs, they want to get away from people who make their work life difficult. As I listen to stories about coworkers who are able to get others to do their work, or supervisors who throw their direct reports under the bus, I often think of Sartre’s line that “Hell is other people.”
Work and The Work
Your day-to-day work tasks can also be a big reason that you feel stressed or burned out or unsatisfied. Many jobs change over time with new managers, mergers, technology, lay-offs, and reorganizations, and workers can find themselves with the same job title but different or increased responsibilities.
Now might be a great time to consider your relationship with your day-to-day work tasks. Does the work that you are doing fit with your strengths? Do you procrastinate on certain tasks? Are there too many tasks on your plate? Are you even sure what tasks are supposed to be on your plate?
Recharging Your Work Life
Identifying the reasons your relationship with your work life needs attention is the first step. The next step is to figuring what you need to do to recharge your work life.
Start by asking yourself:
Am I ready to leave the job?
Am I ready to devote time and energy to making a job or career change?
Job Searching
Is 2025 the year to make the decision to leave your job? The decision to leave is really a decision to create a plan of action for job searching. This means carving out the space in your life to figure out your career goals and job searching strategies.
This also means allowing yourself the space to have some natural worries about leaving. If you have not needed to look for jobs recently, it can feel overwhelming and bring up all sorts of “what-ifs.” What if I can’t find another job? What if I am not good at another job? What if I take another job and hate it? These worries are legitimate! No change happens without a big dose of uncertainty.
Staying and Reframing
I can hear many of you saying, “I would leave my job tomorrow if I could, but I need this job.” You need the pay, the benefits, the stability of the current job, or you are not ready to face the fears that come with embarking on a change. These are all great reasons to stay in a job.
For those who need to stay, recharging your work life means challenging yourself to reframe the way you are approaching your work life. It means thinking about why the job is making you miserable and figuring out what you can and cannot control. You may have little control over how other people act, supervisors’ decisions, and the work tasks that you are asked to do.
You do have control over the way you act, how you react to others, what help you ask for, how much you let stress, annoyance, and frustration get under your skin, and what you tell yourself about the job. If you say to yourself, “I hate this job,” all day long (as true as that may be), it will make it more difficult to get through each day. Reframing with more positive alternatives, such as “This job helps me support my family” or “I am good at this job” are small ways to counteract the negative thoughts that drag you down.
Improving Your Work Life Relationship
Whether you are ready to get your job searching plan in place or need to make internal changes to re-energize your work life, the beginning of a new year is a great time to assess how work is going and identify the changes that will recharge your work life.