Being bored in your job can be incredibly demotivating and can cause you to begin to question the purpose of your role.
Being bored in your job can come from not having enough stimulating work to do. If those pieces of work that make your heart sing dry up, then so does your enthusiasm!
Or, if your role has become very repetitive, you can feel complacent and disenchanted. This can sometimes be displayed in the quality of your work, which may dip and become self-sabotaging, which in turn can impact your self-worth.
Either way, no matter the reason, being bored in your job isn’t fun. For some, the recognition of boredom may well suggest it’s time for a new challenge, however, if every time we felt a sense of boredom we took that as a nod to seek new employment, we’d be moving jobs a lot!
To know if boredom in your job really is an indicator of it being time to move or just a blip, you need to take a couple of actions.
Let’s begin with you. Why do you think that you are feeling dissatisfied? Are you still connected with your ‘why’? Often if I feel that I’ve lost my way, it tends to be because I’ve lost connection with my values and my purpose, re-connecting with these can be the one thing that ignites my passion and motivation. If you don’t know what your core values are, read this post to refine them. Ask yourself if your role is currently in alignment with your values. If it isn’t at all, then you need to take some time to re-evaluate what role would support this and take actions to make any adjustments to fulfil this.
Now, what about your colleagues? I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with wonderful people in most of my past ventures. Interestingly, this can stop you from moving forward and give you an excuse to put up with feeling boredom in your job, because you love the people around you.
This can be tricky because I truly believe that the people you work with makes a huge difference to your happiness in your role. But, are nice people in the office enough to outweigh any boredom or dissatisfaction with your job? Honestly, I can’t answer that question for you. That needs to be something that you review when considering your core values and what motivates you. What I can advise from personal experience is leaving a good group of colleagues behind can be scary, but they won’t be the only nice people in the world.
Whilst you figure that out (it will take longer than one night to decide) can you connect with people you trust at work to share the boredom you’re experiencing and ask them to share any upcoming opportunities with you that you could support on.
You can further take control of your current feeling by talking to your line manager or leadership team. Express that you’re not feeling challenged and you recognise that it’s affecting your motivational levels and you’d like to take on a new task. Be clear about what this would look like to you, prepare a list of your strengths and which tasks you enjoy completing and ask if there’s anything coming in that would support your skill set. What you do not want, is to ask for more work and to be given work that bores you even more. There will always be parts of our roles that we don’t always love, but it’s how much you have to do those tasks that impacts your motivation.
If you’re not sure what your strengths are, ask your colleagues, your family, your friends. I guarantee there are things that you do well that you personally don’t yet recognise.
Ultimately, boredom in your role might mean it’s time for a new challenge. You need to reflect logically before making a big decision, take some responsibility for what you can control and ask for and recognise what tasks makes your heart sing and ask for more of that!
Love
Nicole
