Work In Colour - Work. Think. Live. In Colour
Wednesday 20th October 2010 | 1 comment
I have been going to the same dentist for many years. I like Nathalie very much and she is a great dentist, but I can't say I actively look forward to my visits. Over the years, as you'd expect, they have involved an amount of pain, time and money :)
Nathalie, on the other hand, looks forward to seeing all her patients and is quite passionately attached to improving their dental health and fixing their problems. On my last visit I asked her (in so much as one can 'ask' a dentist anything while in the chair) to tell me what attracts her to dental work. I'm always interested in talking to people who love what they do, and it's clear that Nathalie belongs in that category.
I didn't confess my long-held suspicion that many dentists are wannabe doctors who are in it for the money (sorry, dental readers, but I am particularly thinking of Ben Harper, the father in My Family here) but she must have heard the scepticism in my voice. She launched into a seriously riveting account of the joys of treating oral hygiene problems, the total pleasure when she removes a child's fear of the dentist and the Agatha Christie-esque satisfaction of solving a knotty tooth issue. I was transfixed by her passion (even if I hadn't been almost literally glued to her chair.) No doubt, this woman LOVES her job. And it shows.
And we should all have that joy in our work. Now that I have recovered from my original career as a lawyer, I have that joy. (Except at BAS time.) And I work with all my Escape Hatch clients so they can have it, too.
It's about finding your strengths and working out how to use them every day.
It's not always in the minutiae of your daily activities, though. The joy can come from a sense of connection to purpose that resonates for you. I remember a story I read somewhere about John F Kennedy visiting a NASA facility in the early days of the space program. After touring the facility, he was walking down a corridor and spied a bloke sweeping the floor with a broom. He stopped. 'And what do you do here?' he is said to have asked - though I would have thought even JFK would recognise a cleaner :) The man smiled broadly and said, 'I'm doing the same thing that everyone here is doing - I am putting a man on the moon.'
Do you have that sense of joy (or satisfaction) in your work? If not, what are you prepared to do about it?
This one made me think...loved the JFK story, thanks very much