There is an aspect of my job that quite frankly, I loathe, it’s something that is absolutely critical but because of its repetitive and tedious nature I face the task with dread every day.  For a long time I only talked about how much I hate doing it, how the stuff never ends, blah blah blah then finally I decided to address the situation by find out from the people who know whether there was a different approach to take in order to obtain the information required. To my pleasure it was determined that there was, to my dismay it was determined that this different methodology couldn’t be used just yet because there’s going to be a system upgrade, at that moment my bubble burst.

Head down, tail between legs I went right back to complaining about having to do that task and how much work is required to do it and how it won’t ever all be done.  The problem really wasn’t the task so much as it was, what I thought about it.  I’ve been in this situation before at a previous job. I’d gotten a promotion, one with greater responsibility and more ”important” work, however one part of it required me to do something repetitive and tedious on a daily basis. I was appalled at having to do it, I thought, surely this cannot be a part of THIS job, but it was.  What made me change my mind about it in that job is that I actually dug a little deeper into how that work was generated in the first place, learning about what the information I was seeing every day actually meant, generating stats based on that work, and finally breaking it up into chunks that were more manageable. By doing this I was able to drop that notion that the work wasn’t important enough for me to do. I mean really who did I think I was anyway?

To be clear, I wasn’t happy about my bubble being burst seeing that I had taken an action in order to change a situation. The beauty of the bursting, was even though I didn’t get the result that I was looking for, I did get a change. My mind and my approach were what changed and most times just changing those things can improve whatever situation or task that you’re facing.

Did someone just burst your bubble? It’s not the end of the world. The contents of that bubble may hold the key and or the change that you’re looking for just hang around for a minute and put some thought into what it really means, not what it looks like.