What is St. Valentine’s Day?

Is this Love? This adorable dog doesn’t understand, and wants to know why this is happening. I wondered myself how St. Valentine’s Day, sweet as it can be, came to be such a thing. So, I looked it up.

First, I found there is no consensus on who St. Valentine is. History.com tells us there are about 12 of them, plus a pope.

Another finding is that tales of St. Valentine are at least as gruesome as they are romantic. This holiday we think of as all about love is about beheading too.

In all fairness to the mythology, the beheading was supposed to have been about St. Valentine’s defense of love and marriage.

But, guess what, it is also just as much about work! Some believe that “God worked through” St. Valentine to teach people about love, against the wishes of the Roman Emperor, Claudius II.

Claudius II believed unmarried men made better soldiers, so off with St. Valentine’s head.

Seems likely that, if St. Valentine was willing to die for it, St. Valentine loved his work. I do too, love my work. And, if you don’t already, so can you.

So, what does this look like? What does it take?sdswq

Hot Groups Are Love

My favorite example of love and work is the “Hot Group” I read about years ago in the Harvard Business Review:

A hot group is just what the name implies: a lively, high-achieving, dedicated group, usually small, whose members are turned on to an exciting and challenging task. Hot groups, while they last, completely captivate their members, occupying their hearts and minds to the exclusion of almost everything else. They do great things fast.

Occupying hearts and minds to the exclusion of almost everything else. That really does sound like the early part of Dr. Helen Fisher’s three stages of love: Lust, Attraction, and Attachment.

The attachment phase, while less exhilarating perhaps, brings with it a sense of confidence and security that it’s okay to take a break, things will go on.

As I have written before, it is important and necessary that Hot Groups, start-ups, entrepreneurships, new jobs…while heavy on emotion, must find and respect boundaries to help keep them. their relationships, and their love of their work—from burning out.

This self-regulation applies as well for the many people these days, due to the pandemic and rise of entrepreneurialism, who are not able to love their work through the love of a group.

How to Love Your Work

The first line of my book, Getting to G.R.E.A.T.: 5-Step Strategy for Work and Life, is “A great life depends on a great fit between who we are and the environments in which we work and live.”

The study of 2000 participants, done by OnePoll for Motivosity, found not only that 69% loved their jobs but also that it took about four different positions before people found their “dream job.

In other words, four positions before they found their ‘dream environment’, which is, of course different for different people, depending on who they are.

To take the high road here, we could say that each not quite satisfying enough position is a step closer to four!  Then again, sometimes it is the internal environment, what goes on in the mind, that needs a bit of change, before any job at all can feel like a dream job.

There are a lot of good articles online on how to love your work. Here are 2:

From Brooks, we learn that how much we love our jobs is related to shared values and sense of accomplishment. Absent those, given the adverse impact on our health, it might well be time to move on.

That said, Bower reminds us that often enough it is a lot less expensive in time, energy, maybe money too—to love the one you’re with, rather than to change jobs.

A Simple Test

Sometimes job dissatisfaction, or dissatisfaction with anything in life, can be caused by a relatively undisciplined mind.

In fact, it was the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who taught us that people are their happiest when they are in a state of exquisite focus and attention, which he called Flow.

Our minds wander freely about 70% of the time. They wander into past regrets and future worries. Well, no wonder we feel unhappy, but it is in no way clear, with all the mind wandering, that it is actually even the job.

To find out whether you could fall in love with your job just by taking better command of the mind, there is an exercise called “Focus and Release” in the Mind Management pulldown at https://madelaineweiss.com

Practice this exercise for a bit, and see what you find.

And to talk with me about digging a little deeper on this or something else, schedule your complimentary chat here: https://calendly.com/weissmadelaine/

Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

Love,

Madelaine

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