What You Really Need to Love Your Job

We all want to align our talents and passions with our careers. And, of course, we hope that whatever job that is happens to pay us well.

It doesn’t usually work that way. To truly love your job, we do a lot of soul-searching. Maybe we jump from job to job as we try to find one that is the right fit. Or we focus on salary or titles and find that we aren’t as satisfied as we expected to be.

Knowing a lot about yourself and your interests and skills is crucial. But looking at external factors matters, too.

Enter The Self-Determination Theory. While it does sound entirely inward-looking, applying it to a particular job is useful in predicting whether the job will make you happy.

As summarized by Cal Newport, SDT asserts that your work must fill three psychological needs to make people happy: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

• Autonomy refers to control over how you fill your time.
• Competence refers to mastering useful kills.
• Relatedness refers to a feeling of connection to others.

That relatedness–positive connections to bosses and colleagues–is crucial to enjoying your job. According to Annie McKee, founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute, great relationships are one of the three factors that people, regardless of their jobs, companies, or even countries, say they need and want in their work. The other drivers of happiness are having a meaningful vision of the future–ideally one that aligns your personal vision and the vision of the company–and having a purpose. “They want to know that they — and their organizations — are doing something big that matters to other people,” wrote McKee in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review.

Happiness Translates to Better Business

Finding all those elements in a job is far from easy, but drilling down to what does matter to happiness will help you better evaluate the options that you have in your career.