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Finding Love: Part Two – Loving Who You Work For

As the people I work with start to transition from toil, slavery, and fear to joy and freedom, they begin to cultivate their appetite for love and their capacity to love. You start to believe that you can love the work you do.   

One of the things that can make the most significant difference is starting to think about why you love doing it.  What aspects of the activities you engage in while you do you love the most?  What activities you engage in while you do you love the least?  And what underlying reason seems to drive that?    

How can you reflect on the things you’d like to do more of and those you’d like to do less of?  What’s the difference?  What’s the reason behind this?   

Novelty is not Enough: Noticing Purpose 

One of my experiences was working as an expert witness.  When I started, I loved it because it was new.  I held the status of an expert, and there was the thrill of doing something for the first time. However, over time, that was no longer enough.  I discovered that I enjoyed interacting with clients, solicitors, and barristers.  I appreciated visiting law firms to discuss what being an expert witness entailed.  I relished presenting to their clients.  I cherished uncovering the essence of the dispute at hand.   

However, in the end, writing long, detailed analytical reports became something I no longer enjoyed.  It turned into a drain, a toil.  Why did it feel like a drain and a toil?  Because fundamentally, the cases I was working on had simply grown too large.  The last case I worked on involved a hundred different fee-earning professionals.  A billion pounds in damages was at stake in a winner-takes-all scenario.  It was just too immense.  I felt like I was merely a cog in the machine—perhaps a valuable and significant cog, but still just a cog.   

But it was more than just hard work that weighed on me.  In previous cases, I realised I had a sense of purpose grounded in pursuing justice.  In those situations, it often felt like a David and Goliath struggle, and I was engaged by lawyers advocating for the underdog. 

Discovering why I loved and what I loved enabled me to choose to stop doing it.  It wouldn’t be new again; that was just something that happened at the beginning.  The cases I was being offered were no longer felt they had the purpose of justice.  So, I let go of expert witness work, despite the financial rewards, and found other things I love doing.   

Finding Your Critical Love Factors  

I have reflected long and hard about what enables me to love the work I do.  I strongly encourage you to review your various work experiences, hobbies, and passions to discover your own critical love factors. 

What I began to realise more and more is that the reason I love doing something offers one or more of four things:  

1. I love teaching.  Anything that enables me to share knowledge and information with others, helping them grow and develop, is something I enjoy doing.   
2. I love collaborating with businesses—early stage, small, and medium-sized enterprises.  I love the entrepreneurial spirit, being around it, and its dynamics.   
3. I love collaborating with organisations (charities, social enterprises and for-profit businesses) that focus on technology or social impact, sometimes both.   
4. I love variety.  I continually want to try out new things and explore new ideas.   

Delegation, Partnering and Outsourcing 

I am now doing more of what I love.  I either stop doing things I don’t enjoy or ask someone else to handle them.   

I love the process of creating content by sharing ideas.  It feeds my love of teaching and exploring new ideas.  I am happy to talk on Zoom, but I don’t enjoy transcribing, writing, or starting with a blank page, so I need someone to assist me.   

I appreciate the impact my LinkedIn profile can have and the conversations it allows me to engage in.  However, I’m not fond of the routine of making sure I post every day, check my messages, and notice anniversaries, so members of the team take care of that. 

For many years, I disliked the idea of being on video.  I still don’t especially enjoy it, but I love its potential as a medium for teaching.  I’ve now found a workaround.  I work with a partner to develop a series of videos, but I don’t handle the video editing, subtitling or promotion.  I delegate all of that to others.   

Conclusion 

So, what is the reason for the things you love doing and those you don’t?  As you begin to assess these, you’ll have more opportunities to create the work you love and spend your time enjoying it.   

Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.