A Path to Happiness Through Meaningful Work
What Is Happiness? Be Happier by Creating Meaning in a Job
Jul 11, 2008
Happiness is not a place, a destination to discover or achieve. Happiness is a process, a path of life one may travel through intention, choice, and consciousness. One's work can be a source of happiness if the work is meaningful.
What Is Happiness?
Psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar defines happiness as "the overall experience of pleasure and meaning." Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness and a founder of the movement of positive psychology, further defines an individual's level of happiness as the combination of a genetic set-point, the circumstances of the individual's life, and the voluntary actions and activities the person undertakes toward happiness.
It is estimated that 50 percent of a person's happiness is relatively fixed by genetics and environment. Though this is a significant limiting factor, the remaining 50 percent within a person's control is also significant.
Work as a Happiness Factor
Since most people work a significant part of each day, whether paid employment, self employment, or family raising, work life is a major contributor toward happiness.
Positive psychology researcher Amy Wrzesniewski ("Jobs, careers, and callings: People’s relations to their work." Journal of Research in Personality, 31, 21-33.) describes three distinct orientations people have toward work:
- Work as a job. Seeing work as a source of income enabling desired outcomes and activities outside of work. Holding a job to support a family or to fund one's hobbies is an example. Job satisfaction comes primarily from the income earned.
- Work as a career. Seeing work as a ladder, a progression toward greater pay, status, and responsibility. Job satisfaction comes primarily from continuing advancement. A person seeing work as a career will often dedicate extraordinary amounts of time and energy to the work, seeing that as a temporary cost of future gain.
- Work as a calling. Seeing work as a calling, a person derives satisfaction from the work itself. The person feels called to do the work based on inner drives and the feeling that the work derives from an inner or higher direction.
Meaningful Work
Returning to Ben-Shahar's definition of happiness, recall the importance of meaning. Meaningful work, then, is likely to result in greater happiness for a person than non-meaningful work. Therefore, those whose work is a calling are likely to be happier than those whose work is a job or a career. Research confirms this. What does that mean for people whose work is a job, a career, or a family responsibility?
Making Work Meaningful
Those for whom work is not a calling can still gain the benefit of greater happiness from meaningful work by recalling that 50 percent of happiness is under an individual's control. Work can be perceived as more meaningful, thereby increasing one's happiness by:
- Recognizing the greater good resulting from the work. A person's routine responsibilities in a hospital can take on greater meaning by recognizing the hospital's role in returning people to good health.
- Recognizing one's role in the larger organization. A person responsible for maintaining a home might see that a well maintained home provides a stable base for the family's health, safety, and growth.
- Focusing on the relationships involved in the work. A person providing child care services might see the work as enabling the children's parents to hold jobs with confidence in the children's safety.
Meaningful work and conscious choice can contribute to greater life happiness.
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Resources:
Britton, Kathryn. "Meaningful Work as Part of the Meaningful Life." Positive Psychology News Daily, July 7, 2008.
Seligman, Martin Ph.D. Authentic Happiness. Free Press, 2002.
Ben-Shahar. Happier. McGraw Hill, 2007
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