Making Peace with Your Work:An Invitation to Find Meaning in The Madness

At work (and in life) we seek ideals like contentment, fulfillment, autonomy and peace. Instead we find that work (like life) is riddled with challenges and contradictions. Work may put food on the table, but fail to feed our soul. It may provide for our children, but compete with them children for our time. To work is a privilege, but to have to work is a burden. Important work might, surprisingly, lose meaning for us personally. And even the most satisfying work can be tedious and stress provoking at times.

To achieve satisfying personal and organizational results, we must reconcile these paradoxes of work. Whether your goal is to stay for the long haul, or move on at the first opportunity, this book will show you how to look beyond the madness, and find the deeper meaning in whatever work you choose—or whatever work has chosen you. The book is organized as a series of reflections on different aspects of work, real life stories, probing questions and helpful exercises you can apply to deepening your relationship with work right away.

EXCERPTS from Delorese’s forthcoming book:

Making Peace with Your Work:

An Invitation to Find Meaning in the Madness

“We don’t have two lives: a work life and a personal life. We have a life to live. Work defines it, enriches it, sustains, and, if we’re not mindful, can destroy it.”

“…It’s as though we are locked in a love-hate dance with our work. Listen to the workplace chatter: We want to earn a good living, but complain about having to go to work. We count the days until retirement, yet fear we might become irrelevant when gainful work ends. We crave the security work provides, but rail against the loss of freedom. We enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done, and the thrill of material success. But we are also quick to complain about work overload, workplace politics, and low morale.”

“Carl Jung once wrote: “When the individual does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn in opposite halves.” Because our workplaces and communities are extensions of each of us, our inner struggles or ambivalence show up systemically as well.  Our workplaces are riddled with impossible polarities and competing demands. We extol the value of teamwork, but reward people based on individual achievement. We encourage people to take risks and innovate, but find mistakes intolerable. We invite workers to think strategically, but allow no time to reflect. We support family friendly work policies, while we demand longer hours and excessive workloads. In our larger global community, we are silent witnesses to both the suffering of oppressed workers and the good fortune of the free. We are simultaneously saddened by the plight of the unemployed or underpaid, and inspired by the privilege and prowess of the overpaid.

To create effective, harmonious workplaces we must first make peace within ourselves and with our own work. When we begin to reconcile our inner contradictions, we begin to heal the outer world. How do we balance our basic drive to shore up earthly treasures, with our soul’s drive to have a richer, fuller experience of the time we have to live? How do we redefine for ourselves what it means to ‘make a good living?’”

Here are some excerpts from the “Invitational” exercises at the end of each chapter:

FINDING MEANING IN THE MADNESS. . .