How to Refuel the Joy
A simple framework for turning work into positive energy
The quest for the secrets of happiness is one of the most ancient pursuits there is. Spoiler alert, that quest does not end with this newsletter.
Earlier this week, we shared our hypothesis that joy is the fuel, not the outcome, of success. Today, we are going to share a simple framework that might nudge you in the direction of more joy in your working life.
There is some superb writing out there that might help to stimulate your thinking on the practice of pursuing happiness in your life (as well as some terribly bad advice!). We’ll wrap up some of the best of that writing in our LookUP List later this month.
But here’s a snapshot of four of my favourite books from this month, and the things they reminded me about creating a happier life.
From Gretchen Rubin. A really good way of becoming happier is by consciously doing lots of little things that make you (and other people) happy.
From Epicurus. Happiness isn’t just about seeking immediate pleasure. Or rather, pleasure with horrible consequences isn’t really pleasure at all.
From Jonathan Haidt. There’s a lot of balance required - between the self and others, rational and emotional, work and leisure.
From Barbara Ehrenreich. Unfounded positivity is not the same as happiness. And it can lead people and whole cultures astray.
These are all highly useful things to remember as we think about our work, but the aim of this piece is not to create a grand plan for happiness, but to try and put work in its proper place in the mix.
As we covered in the last piece, at its worst, work can become a futile obsession that tragically drains our reserves of joy, or traps us in an absurd comedy, in a way that actually slows down our progress, and spoils our lives.
At its everyday best, work can create moments that are glimmers of joy. Highlights that delight the inner storytellers of their lives, and fuel our progress.
This piece is going to give you three simple ways to think about the moments of joy that you can create in your work - and a simple framework for pulling them together.
“Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we use this energy. Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how use it. And it is an energy under control, to do with as we please; hence attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Weeks at work can go by in a flash, as if we were almost non-participants in our own working life. That’s extremely unlikely to refuel your stock of joy.
We need to try to create moments in our working lives where we are fully lost in doing what we are good at, and producing something meaningful.
But we can’t assume that what Flow means to some (for me, several hours of uninterrupted creative output) is the same as what it is for others.
When you interview a group of brilliant people, as we do with our LookUP Experts, you experience moments where your interviewees almost levitate out of their chairs with enthusiasm, and very often, this represents people describing their flow.
Here are four very different examples:
When you read books about Flow, they tend to describe a consistent type of Flow: hilltop retreats, log cabins, beautiful landscapes. Because it’s the author’s dream!
But in reality, there are extremely different visions of what gives people a sense of Flow, and to what extent it is social, crafty, contemplative.
Yet it’s not unusual for people with extremely different senses of Flow and productivity to have extremely similar-looking working days.
The natural tendency of the modern work ecosystem is to disrupt our flow. To suck us into a machine-gun rhythm of long-ish video or in-person meetings, separated by a scramble of desk work.
And surely that’s a common enemy for all of us!
The most productive and successful people I know have come to know their Flow - what they need to absorb themselves in regularly, to build energy and momentum. And then they have the courage to be pretty aggressive in redefining their working time to maximise it.
Whenever a system can be analysed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.
― Jonathan Haidt
You might need to read this quote a couple of times to get your head around it…and then still need some time to think about it!
But I think this concept of coherence can be a really powerful way of thinking about how and why the joy goes missing in work, and how to try to re-fuel it.
We can all experience things that should be joyful in our working lives:
because we have done good work, that uses our skills well
because the team or business around us is enjoying success
because we have done something to make the world a better place
Perhaps the big existential joy crisis of modern work is that is often pretty hard to find moments where these things are fully coherent. Here’s some examples of ways that things can fall out of step (based on redacted true stories…)
The three forces of our own mastery, our organisation’s success, and our broader impact are never going to be fully coherent, all the time. But it’s really useful to look for moments when they come together, and to try and increase your stock of them.
If you lead an organisation or a team, creating these moments of coherence, as an antidote to the mayhem and personal conflict of modern life, is one of the most powerful things you can do.
Whenever we get a chance to help people with that, via Town Halls, conferences, or learning programmes, we can feel the joyful energy refuelling in the room.
“As you plunge into learning some art or skill, the world around you appears new and bursting with infinite horizons. Each day brims with new discoveries as you take your tentative first steps, slowly pushing the bounds of exploration. You make mistakes, but even these are empowering, because they are mistakes you have never made before.”
Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning
In my recent interview with Emma Saddleton for the WACL Futures Network podcast, Pass it On, the hardest area by far was when we talked about the things we can do to rediscover the joy, when we are really on the back foot.
The truth is that this can be incredibly difficult. Both because a) it is hardest to find joy within ourselves when we feel the least joyful, and b) because the kind of environment that are kills your joy is unlikely to suddenly turn itself around and become a happiness-factory at your request.
Perhaps the most achievable way to refuel your stock of joy is to throw yourself into a practice of learning - and whilst learning can be a struggle, not all struggle is bad.
In times of transition, and times of challenge, learning is often the most reliable source of joy. The best businesses understand how important this is, and are investing in their people’s personal progress at every level.
But modern careers are long, and the horizon of many businesses is shorter and shorter. If we want to continuously refuel our joy in work, we need to have our own learning plan, both close in to our work, and further afield.
If that’s something you want to look at, we’ve written about it previously here, and we’ve got a handy framework to help you with it.
Refuelling the Joy is a team sport
If joy in work is crucial fuel for our inner storyteller, and for our sense of personal progress, then refuelling it should be an active practice.
But it’s not something where we are ever likely to succeed on our own. All of the approaches above require the support and encouragement of the people around us.
Joy is inherently relational - it comes from inside and from outside, and the practices that refuel us need willing accomplices. We need co-conspirators in joy!
At LookUP, we are lucky that our partners, our clients and supporters are the kind of people who are looking for joy, and trying to create it in others.
I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in multiple phases of my career to find teams, and often bosses, who were genuinely invested in focusing on the joy in work.
You’ll never have a successful practice of joy in work without cheerleaders, partners, sounding boards and catalysts.
If that’s something that you need more of in your life, you will always find a willing partner in us!
So, here is a summary of a framework to help you refuel your own joy. We hope you find it useful, and that it spurs some new ideas about how to Refuel your Joy.
Let us know how you get on!
At LookUP, we specialise in creating experiences in teams and organisations, bringing people together to grow through the power of story.
From inspiring ‘LookUP Lift’ sessions, to Story Series, to collaborative Sprints around Vision, Culture and Selling Stories, we are experts at re-injecting the Joy into work.
If that’s something you want to explore for your team, get in touch via matthew@wearelookup.com or caroline@wearelookup.com.