Expanding your experiences
For some people, work is life.
For others, they work is in the way of living life.
And then there are all who fall in the spectrum between those two.
Regardless of where you are and how much you love your job, there’s great value in finding experiences that help you detach from work and become more involved and absorbed in your non-work life.
Typically these experiences involve learning new things (i.e.g a new language), seeking out intellectual challenges (e.g., playing chess), doing things to challenge ourselves (e.g., competing in triathlons), or simply doing things to broaden our horizons (e.g., taking a class in a field different from our job).
The more varied experiences you get involved in, the more you broaden your view and create the conditions to sharpen your systems thinking and analogy making skills. Not only that, but getting involved in outside experiences help us in two ways:
First, they force us to devote our mental and intellectual resources to something other than work. Doing so enables us to achieve some level of detachment from it.
Second, they can be highly reinforcing. They allow us to feel a sense of achievement and accomplishment. This can add to our satisfaction on the job or compensate for it should we find ourselves not in the ideal work environment.
How many outside experiences are you involved in that help you detach from work at a psychological level?
