We’ve all been in roles that we deeply despise and when you hate your job, it can feel like you’re not getting much benefit from it.
The Sunday evenings are 10 times tougher, and Tuesday mornings seem to stretch into eternity. In these moments, you may question what you’re doing with your life. You may even be tempted to quit. Especially when you hear of people who are in their first job and that they love it. You silently curse them through envy, thinking they’re so lucky not to have had a sh*t job.
But are they?
When you hate your job, with no clear, immediate escape route, it can feel heavy and overwhelming. But these are the days that make your character. These are the tough days you’ve got to tough it out for a bit. Take the scenario in and learn from it, then you can push forward from there. There’s nothing to say you’ll be in it forever, so squeeze some of the benefits out of it whilst you look for something else.
So if you find yourself ready to move on but without anything lined up, here’s a list of benefits to sticking with it for now, even if you hate your job.
If you hate your job, it helps focus your values and what you want
If there’s one thing that a job you hate does well, it is that it focuses your mind on something you actually want and your true values.
It’s hard to always keep a positive mindset, so naturally, you’re going to think “I don’t want to work in an office again” or “I want to make a positive impact on society in my next job”.
When your mind gives you prompts, it’s important to listen. These are deeper thoughts than you give them credit for, and reveals a lot about you as a person.
If you can hone the message and understand yourself, you’ve gone from working aimlessly to having a more decisive path to search for.
It makes you appreciate when you’ve got something good
If everything that happens to you is “good” (which is a loose definition depending on the person), then this becomes your new average.
Your median line in contentedness. Suddenly, despite having it rather good, you do not appreciate what’s in front of you. We’ve seen this in businesses where people have come straight from school and it’s youthful freedom, into a job which looks after the staff well. This job is taken for granted and becomes their “average”. Then on leaving the role to take up somewhere else which pays more, they realise it’s not always as rosy elsewhere.
It’s so important to appreciate what you’ve got, and that tends to come from the experience of the opposite side of things.
It develops your resilience
Working a job you don’t like (and achieving) develops your resilience, both professionally and in life.
Resilience is only built by going through the tough stints.
This is not a buzzword or something you can learn on the fly, you need to go through the experience and come out the other side.
It helps you learn how to work under stress and pressure
The unpredictability that comes with a job you don’t like is massive.
If you can learn to calm your mind and your environment and still succeed, you can do it anywhere.
That lesson and experience will stay with you and you can use it as a reference point in any future job.
It helps you create mental models for success
One way or another, you have to find ways of making it work.
Sometimes, you’ll reward yourself if you achieve a certain milestone. Or, you may use time management models such as the Pomodoro technique or power hours to get you through your tasks. Whichever it is, these are life lessons that you can use in the future.
If you generate success in the dark times, wait until your energised by your mission, and your career will take off.
It will develop your business understanding
Another understanding you can take away when you hate your job is about how things are (or should be) run.
Whether the mission, processes, or culture is off, you can see this from up close, allowing you a deeper perspective of the different ways to run a business.
You may say “I’d never do something like that”, or “this is something which has to change”. These thoughts are helping develop a more critical view in assessing how businesses can work.
It increases employability chances
Doing something is better than doing nothing.
Not only are you paying the bills, but whether you like the job or not, you’re building both hard and soft skills. Plus, it means there are no gaps in your CV to explain to future employers.
So one way or another, make sure you’re always in a role.
Although all these are benefits of sticking it out when you hate your job, they don’t mean that it’s a permanent fix.
Your mental health is worth infinitely more than any job is, and it pays not to forget that. Use these jobs as learning curves in life, where your experiences in them can shape where you want to go in the future.
By pulling positives from a negative, you’re adapting your mindset for good.
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