The #1 Way to Deal With The Job You Hate (No Sugarcoating The Pill)

When almost everybody else is trying to sugarcoat the pill when it comes to dealing with the job you hate, I am going to be brutally honest with you…

Working a job you hate is like having cancer…

If you don’t find a way to deal with it ASAP chances are that it will ruin your entire life.

And just like with cancer, the best way to deal with the job you hate is to remove it from your life altogether sooner than later.

However, this ain’t an easy task.

But not being easy doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible as many people tend to believe.

During the last 3 years, I’ve managed to successfully remove not one, but two tumor-like jobs I hated from my life and let me assure you that it’s not nearly as scary as most people think… And since I was able to pull this off, you can definitely do it too!

How?

Keep reading!

 

Dealing With The Job You Hate Without Sugarcoating The Pill

1 • Assume Responsibility

Blaming others is the easiest way out of acting towards changing what’s going wrong in our lives for the better.

Yes, it’s probably not your fault that your boss is a dickhead, your colleagues discriminate against you, your clients yell at you, your workload is unmanageable or that your commute is so long that it’s ruining your entire day…

BUT it’s definitely YOUR fault that you keep returning to all this crap you hate day after day.

Nobody forced you into working your terrible job. Nobody is forcing you to keep going back there.

Every day when you get out of bed, you have a choice… You could start getting ready for work or you could prepare your breakfast, eat it peacefully at your own pace, take a shower, go back to bed, and never set your foot at that job you hate ever again.

Or if you are not a psycho just like me, quitting your job without having anything else lined up, you could follow another safer course of action.

Instead of vegging in front of your TV or taking a nap or going out for drinks or scrolling up and down your Facebook feed for 5 hours after you get back from work, you could choose to devote some time and energy towards finding another way to earn your living.

It’s YOUR choice!

Yes, it can be difficult to completely redesign your career, start attending night classes or seminars, beginning a side hustle or attending dozens of job interviews while at the same time holding down a 9-5, exhausting job.

But you CAN make a choice to do whatever it takes towards improving your employment status forever.

2 • Start Saving Money

I know that I must have started sounding like a broken record here but one of the most important things you could possibly do when you hate your job is to start setting some money aside.

Having a substantial financial cushion on the side is going to make the process of dealing with your job a whole lot easier and much less stressful.

Being in a place of not having money to pay the bills is going to result in making decisions out of necessity and fear and those decisions are never going to be in favor of actually improving your situation in the long-term…

I am sure than right now climbing Everest might seem more achievable to you than setting money aside but believe me it’s really not that hard… It just takes some time until you have a significant amount saved.

The trick?

STOP BUYING CRAP YOU DON’T NEED!!!

This includes anything, from ordering takeout every single night to purchasing expensive clothes, shoes, or the latest gadgets…

This is all I did and I managed to save almost a year’s worth of expenses in less than one and a half year.

That simple.

 

3 • Stop Complaining

Venting feels awesome right?

After unloading all the negativity inside your head on those who happen to be around you just like a garbage truck unloads all its trash in a dump, you feel like an enormous weight has been lifted off your shoulders.

The bad news is that despite complaining about your job might indeed improve your mood for a while, sooner or later you’ll have to return to that job you hate and you’ll be back to square one, sad and miserable, once again.

The worse news is that too much complaining about your job just robs you from the energy that you could otherwise invest in actually dealing with it.

The more you keep complaining about your job, the less likely it’ll be to actually start doing what’s necessary to fix it.

If only our problems could be solved by complaining about them right?

Unfortunately, this isn’t how things work…

If you want to successfully deal with the job you hate once and for all, you have to stop acting like it’s not your fault, playing the victim and complaining about it 24/7 and instead redirect all that excess time and energy towards actively improving the situation yourself until you have nothing more to complain about.

 

4 • Embrace Impermanence

In this life, nothing is permanent and guess what!

Your job is one of these nothings…

The average worker no longer has just one career. According to the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, a group that tracks economic trends, the number of careers a worker can expect to have in a lifetime is five — and growing. Changing your job every few years has become common practice, so you shouldn’t think that a few years here and a few years there is a warning sign on your resume. – askmen.com

Either you want it or not at some point your job is going to end one way or another. The company might go bankrupt or relocate, there might be a need for cutbacks and you happen to be one of those people who had to be fired, they might fire you for poor performance (working a job you hate dramatically decreases your performance), or you get drunk Saturday night, call your boss, quit, and then wake up the next day having no recollection of the incident whatsoever.

Your job is NOT permanent, no matter how permanent it might be feeling right now, get that very well in your head!

This is both good and bad news!

The good news is that you probably won’t have to keep working the job you hate until you are old enough to retire (if you live that long).

The bad news is that you are wasting your years working a job you hate which might sooner or later reject you like a bad transplant.

And then what?

You’ll be forced to start looking for another job anyway…

Yeah, no job is really safe and secure but wouldn’t you be better off not being safe and secure working a job you don’t hate or even one you actually enjoy?

Plus, wouldn’t it be much better to start considering your alternatives now that you actually have a job instead of waiting until you are under tremendous amounts of pressure because someone decided to cut your current source of income short and you are in dire need of money to put food on your table and pay the bills?

5 • Start a Side Hustle to Eventually Replace Your Current Income

I know that when it comes to quitting a job, the first thing that comes to mind is going for another better job right?

While this is the mainstream course of action, it’s not the only solid course of action.

In fact, nowadays, more and more people begin hustles which offer the potential to eventually produce a full-time income for them on the side of their 9-5 jobs.

A side-hustle is not just about making more money but rather about building something of substance, around one of your interests or passions, which could also eventually help you escape from the shackles of the 9-5 forever without having to leave your job like right now.

According to a Bankrate study, about 37% of adults in the U.S. have a side hustle. And most of them pay pretty well, at an average of nearly $700 a month!

Maybe you want to start a podcast sharing your thoughts with the world, create a blog, become a web designer or a yoga instructor.

Whatever the case, going for it at the side of your job is a great way to experiment with your idea without having to come face to face with the fear and stress of not having money to cover your expenses.

For instance, this website has been my side hustle for a little more than a year now and despite the fact that I am currently unemployed because I quit my last job without having anything lined up (oops), I am probably going to start looking for another job shortly, because the income my online business brings in right now is simply not enough to sustain me just yet.

Anyway, to get some side-hustle ideas, go ahead and check out those 15 Ways To Replace Your Income In Order To Quit Your Job In 2019.

 

6 • Never Settle

Let me tell you a little story…

I was working for 2 years in the customer service department of a very large international company along with 50 other people… Almost every single one of them hated that job as much as I did, some of them even more!

The company was not that bad but the duties were awful.

We had to deal with hundreds of angry, verbally abusive customers daily. The workload was so huge and unmanageable that we didn’t even have the freedom to go to the toilet not to mention that we had to multitask so much that at the end of the day our brains were so fucked up that we couldn’t even talk to each other…

Anyway, despite everybody hated every single bit of that job, almost all of them had completely settled for it…

There were people who hadn’t even considered trying to do something better with their lives. Others had attempted to find their way out in the past but they’ve failed and given up. A couple of them got a degree in another field by attending remote, night classes but they never actually used it for something else besides whipping the sweat of their forehead while apologizing to angry customers for mistakes they didn’t even make.

The moment I announced that I was leaving that job, everyone’s jaw dropped to the ground; they were all stunned! They kept telling me that they were so jealous of me and that they wished they could go back in time and work harder to find their way out just as I did.

I was able to see the regret in their eyes… I could hear the regret in their voices… I could even smell it on them!

Please don’t be one of those people.

Never settle for anything less than you want. Keep taking action until you reach your goals… Sure, things could go wrong… You might fail, and not just once. But the possibility of living a better life is worth all the trouble, failures, and frustrations…

Mark my words that the chances of regretting leaving the job you hate are way, WAY less than the chances of regretting that you settled for it, never giving yourself a chance to be happier with what you do for a living.

 

7 • Stop Trying to Sugarcoat the Pill

If you’ve already read a couple of articles on dealing with the job you hate before landing on my own, I am sure that you’ll have noticed that the majority of them keep suggesting stuff such as thinking positive about your job or trying to see the bright side or whatever…

That’s bad advice!

First of all, let me tell you first hand that unhating a job you’ve already grown to hate is impossible… Believe me, I’ve tried. Yes, focusing on the “positive” aspects of your job might help you regulate your negative feelings towards it for like a couple of seconds, but sooner or later, they will intensify again!

Working an awful job is like being in an abusive relationship… You could try to think positively about it all you want but that doesn’t change the fact that your partner is going to keep abusing you until you remove them from your life once and for all.

Let me assure you that trying to condition yourself to think positively about bad situations in order to avoid taking action to change them because you don’t know how or because you are scared of the unknown or due to any other reason, is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

The negative feelings towards your job exist for a reason; to make you realize that the situation is not serving you and that you need to take action to improve it.

Don’t try to mask them with fake positivity as an excuse to stay put… Use them as motivation to improve your life and get what you want.

Do you know how lobsters grow?

A lobster is a soft mushy animal that lives inside a rigid shell. That rigid shell does not actually expand as the lobster grows inside it so it eventually becomes very confining and the lobster starts feeling under pressure and uncomfortable.

Once this happens, it goes under a rock formation to protect itself from predatory fish, casts off its shell and produces a new one. During its lifetime, the lobster repeats this process numerous times.

The stimulus for the lobster to grow is the feeling of being uncomfortable! If the lobster tried to beat this uncomfortable feeling by trying to think positive about it, it would never actually grow.

 

8 • Reduce Your Working Hours

One of the best actions I took while being in a job I hated was cutting my working hours in half.

Let me tell you that working a job you hate for 4 hours instead of 8+ could make that job much more tolerable in many ways.

Think about it… Time will pass faster and you’ll be doing things you hate for fewer hours.

Once you get to your job tomorrow do a little experiment… Set an alarm clock in 4 hours from the time your shift begins and when it goes off imagine that this would be the time that you’ll start heading home.

How did this make you feel? Multiply this feeling by 10 and you’ll understand how being a part-time worker at your job actually feels like.

Becoming a part-timer could change your entire perspective towards your job. You might even start liking it!

In addition, working part-time will result in having more time, energy, and clarity to act towards completely eliminating your job without compromising your “security” until that happens.

For instance, becoming a part-time worker made my job hunt a lot easier and much smoother. I was able to schedule more interviews during a day and I wasn’t depleted while attending them. Furthermore, I started devoting much more time and energy towards other things that are of great significance to me such as growing my online business, reading books, meditating, and working out.

Yes, I had to cut back some luxuries like buying random stuff or going out for drinks every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night but to achieve any substantial goal requires sacrifices.

Lastly, I realized that I could easily survive by earning less money and that gave me the extra push I needed to actually take another job that paid less money but was much more tolerable than the one I already had.

“It’s helped me gain perspective and to be less fearful, knowing I would survive if I left the job as I’m already OK with far less money. It’s increased my physical and psychological energy, for sure. I have more space to pursue other things, and a feeling of already having one foot out of the door. – careershifters.org

 

Conclusion

For me, there’s only one true way towards successfully dealing with a job you hate and that’s leaving it sooner or later…

No job is permanent so at some point, you might have to leave it anyway, either you want it or not so there’s no point in sticking it out.

Take responsibility for your bad situation and start doing what’s necessary to improve it. Stop complaining, start saving money, and devote as much free time and energy you have to plan your way out either this is finding another job or going for a side-hustle.

Do whatever it takes and never settle for less than what you want deserve.

Going part-time at your current job might smooth things out a lot more than you think.

Personally, I have tried being grateful or accepting the situation or focusing on the lessons or trying to see the positive side, but at the end of the day, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that staying in a job I hated was just a waste of my life.

At the end of the day, why even bother wasting so much time and energy trying to convince yourself to stay in a job you hate when you could as well invest it towards finding a better job or acquiring a new skillset in order to make a career shift or start a side hustle which would allow you to eventually become your own boss?

There’s just no point…

 

• For how long have you been working that job you hate?
• Have you tried dealing with it in a way I didn’t mention in my article?
• If yes, how?
• Were you successful in dealing with it or not?

Let us know all about your opinion and experience in the comments below.

 

If you have any questions or need any further help or guidance from me, I encourage you to email me at harry@dearboss-iquit.com or drop me a PM on my Wealthy Affiliate Profile.

Whatever the case, I will get back to you as soon as possible.

My best regards to you,

Harry,
dearboss-iquit.com