How being unhappy at work can be bad for your career

Many people are unhappy in their job, but don’t have the time, energy or resources to look for something else and so stay where they are. However, seeing as though you spend most of your adult life working it helps to have a job which you enjoy or, at the very least, a job which you don’t hate. If you find yourself doing a job which stresses you out and makes you miserable your health is likely to deteriorate as a result. Plus, if you’re unhappy at work you probably won’t put as much effort into the tasks you are given, which could reflect badly on you.

Consequently, being unhappy at work could actually be bad for your career. It is incredibly difficult to motivate yourself to do a good job when you get no sense of fulfillment or enjoyment out of what you’re doing. Tasks may be doled out and you are given ones which you take with very little enthusiasm, which is picked up by those around you. You’re hardly likely to be picked out as promotion material if you only reluctantly do what you’re told to and don’t even do a particularly good job of it, anyway.

You may be unhappy with your job because you don’t get along with your colleagues or managers or you feel the job is beneath you. It may be a boring job that you only do because it helps to pay the bills, rather than being a career which you want to develop. Even if you’re only at the bottom of the career ladder, however, you have to cultivate a positive persona within the workplace as nobody wants to work with someone who is depressed all the time and who seems to lack motivation.

However, it is difficult to portray yourself as an upbeat kind of person when you are really unhappy in your job. If all your colleagues feel the same way because of the way things are being run then at least there is a sense of solidarity, but when you’re isolated in being unhappy you can feel trapped. You could always look for another job, but this isn’t always feasible when you have a family to support and there isn’t much work around. Sometimes, you just have to grit your teeth and bear it.

At the end of the day, though, you will be better off finding a job that doesn’t make you unhappy, as this is probably the only way you’re going to get anywhere and develop the career that you’d like to.

http://www.helium.com/items/1882555-how-being-unhappy-at-work-can-be-bad-for-your-career