June 17, 2014

Humans are a crazy race guided by their emotions -- the need for success, failure, acceptance, and just about anything else they are programmed to experience, often in the workplace. Work can bury you in more ways than one. In today's world many people are not emotionally and physically able to work. When they do work - no matter what age group - they want their job to have meaning and purpose or they sabotage so they don't have to work at all. In the old days, people worked to survive, pay bills, etc. Today consciousness is shifting that as the nature of reality guides humanity's destiny on a more evolved course.

No matter what their situation, most people feel stressed upon returning to work after a break, usually a weekend. Some are organized leaving everything in readiness be they stressed about it or not. Others do not prepare. When they return, it's like a scene from a sitcom - chaos, unfinished business, and all the issues that go with it.

Bad case of work fear? Here's what you can do about it   Telegraph - June 17, 2014
Most of us spend Sundays dreading Monday morning at work. So much so that you end up hating Sundays. Entrepreneur Josephine Fairley offers practical tips for overcoming work fear:

Don't drown your sorrows.
If you loathe your job it's hard enough to haul yourself into the office on Monday morning, but doing so with a crushing hangover is surely going to make things even worse, as you nod through the team meeting or find it impossible to string a sentence together.

Clear your desk on Friday night.
OK, so you can't wait to get out the door and knock back that first G&T of the weekend. I am going to sound like your mother here, but tidy your desk first. Create a sense of order, because I've absolutely no doubt that knowing the first thing you have to do on Monday morning is tackle a pile of papers which is one staple short of avalanching onto the carpet tiles is going to intrude on your downtime.

Get your work gear together when you get home on Friday night.
There is nothing that says 'I've got to go to work tomorrow' like organizing your briefcase and work clothes on Sunday night in preparation for the following morning. So if you want to extend your weekend as long as possible - assuming you've managed not to do any paperwork on Saturday or Sunday - why not spend 10 minutes getting ready for Monday morning immediately you arrive at home at the end of the week? It saves feeling hard-done-by as you do the adult equivalent of shine your shoes and sharpen your pencils on the last evening of the weekend; basically, the weekend will end when you get dressed and head out of the door on Monday. Psychologically, that's a 12-hour bonus. (Er, can you tell I was a Brownie?)

Write things down.
Go on, a good old brain-dump. Get it off your chest: the colleague that you want to make a voodoo doll of, the grossly unfair workload, the fact you're sitting in a cubicle with no glimpse of daylight and a weird kind of dead-mouse smell. (Been there.) Just analyzing your feelings like this might a) make it all seem a bit insubstantial, when written down. It might just make you feel much better - a bit of a 'life colonic'. Or it might be the spur to...

... change your job.
Oh, so obvious - and so difficult, I agree. But surely life is too short not to spend it doing something you at least enjoy, if not love. Could you retrain? Start a business? Study for a qualification which would improve your prospects? (Or even - now there's a word - 'downshift', if you feel like a hamster in a wheel?) These seem like massive steps, but resenting what you do for a living corrodes your life and your soul.

Or change your mindset.
Maybe you can't, for whatever reason, change your job. (Though I don't like 'can't', as a word, or an excuse.) If you can't change something, the alternative is to change how you feel about it - through self-help books, therapy, life coaching. After all, nobody loves a whiner. (Except, possibly, other whiners. And you can count me out, on that score.)

And to employers...

I'd also like to say something. I've worked for some fantastic bosses, and some dreadful ones. In addition to fostering a creative and encouraging environment - so much so that those of us who worked for one particular publishing company all agree we literally SKIPPED to work - the good ones made small, caring gestures that made us feel valued. I've always tried to do that myself. Which means: creating a pleasant setting to work in. (A breeze, in the era of IKEA.)

Acknowledging small triumphs, perhaps with a bottle of wine or a small gift, quite outside financial rewards; something to make staff feel valued. That particular A-star employer used to put a bunch of daffodils on our desk on the first day of spring, and a bottle of champagne when the circulation figures for that magazine went up. Not massively expensive gestures, but they all contributed to a workplace environment in which we all looked forward to - rather than dreaded - Monday mornings. Because surely life's too short not to llke Mondays.