Reignite Career Motivation with the 5 Love Languages
Motivation can make or break your career. Sounds dramatic, I know. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less true. Career motivation goes beyond having the willpower to finish tasks each workday; it’s the drive to think long-term, set goals and stick to them, and remain interested and active in your chosen industry.
One of the best choices you can make to stay motivated is to prioritize job opportunities that understand the significance of employee engagement.
According to research from HR.com, over 90% of HR pros agree that engagement is linked to performance, and it has the strongest impact on customer service and productivity.
Feeling engaged and enthusiastic at your job day-to-day and taking pride in your performance and productivity make it so much easier to be inspired in your career. But it’s not all on the company culture. Since these experiences are so crucial to your success, you shouldn’t have to depend on your leaders and HR department to get you excited.
When you’re committed to maintaining career motivation, you can get yourself pumped up about it. Your passion will offer a productivity boost all on its own for your short- and long-term goals.
Here’s how you can use the five love languages as a template to rekindle that kind of passion:
1. Quality time
From my informal polling of friends and family, quality time seems to be one of the most dominant love languages. With a person you care about, it shows that you enjoy their company and want to be an active part of their life. Believe it or not, spending quality time with your career has a similar effect.
Investing the time to connect with your industry outside of work can reignite your career motivation and passion. By keeping up with your favorite blogs, reading timeless or recent books about the industry, and inviting trending topics into conversation with friends and connections, you will begin to have a more positive relationship with your career.
2. Words of affirmation
Sometimes one of the hardest things to do at work is to take pride in what you accomplish, and that’s especially true for creative employees. Like any artist, passionate workers want to nitpick and keep hammering out everything from emails to presentations until it’s all perfect. But that constant berating that nothing is good enough weakens the way you feel about yourself in your career.
Practice saying aloud, “I am doing a great job on this task. This is a wonderful outlet for my creativity. I love what I do. I am grateful for the choices that led me here.” Or return to step one and journal out a list of what inspires you to continue your career.
3. Acts of service
You can’t exactly wash the dishes as an act of service for your creative career. But you can do it some favors. In the long run, your career will thank you for being active on LinkedIn and in your professional Facebook groups, attending conferences or useful webinars, and keeping in touch with your professional network.
Following through on promises to yourself and your career is another crucial act of service. If you declare that this is the month you’ll ask for a raise or start a new habit, and then you give up on it, your career motivation will suffer because it will be tainted with disappointments and broken promises.
Do you have trouble sticking to your resolutions at work? You need to read this!
4. Meaningful gifts
Improve your workspace so that you reduce the dread you feel going to work on Monday mornings. Looking forward to using a dazzling new organizer, caring for a charming plant, or reading inspirational quotes that fill the wall space can bring a huge lift to your day.
You can also buy yourself cute, themed gifts like fancy office supplies that help romanticize your daily tasks or T-shirts that remind you how well you kick butt at work. These get you pumped up about your identity as it connects to your job. And they showcase how much of a nerd you are for your industry. After all, buying yourself gifts in moderation is a form of self-care!
5. Physical touch
I know what you’re thinking: How does physical touch come into this? Careers aren’t tangible! Although that vein of thought is technically correct, there are at least two interpretations of this love language that can apply to building up your career motivation:
- Engage your senses while you work.
Filling your workspace with sensory stimuli is a great way to stay grounded while you work. For sight, sound, and smell, I like to add color to the room, keep the window open to hear birds chirping, and use an essential oil diffuser. And a weighted blanket or a hot mug to wrap my hands around are wonderful for touch.
- Keep in touch with colleagues.
Building relationships with the people you work with is absolutely a way to show love to your career. It helps you stay connected, engaged, and excited to be part of an awesome team that gets to do some cool stuff!
