I’m a career coach that helps people to be happy at and enjoy their work. There have been times when someone I’m working with will have a job offer at hand and come to me asking, “Should I accept this job?” Naturally, I ask, “Do you think you will enjoy it?” Then there is a long silence...and it becomes clear that while this person does want to love and be successful at what they do, this question hasn’t really been considered.

So, I follow up with the question, “Why would you take this job?”

And then out comes all the other factors that have been rolling around in their mind and taking precedence over a very important thing: whether they would really enjoy the work. Factors like how it’s a “good opportunity”, how their peers are in similar roles, how their family would never understand if they turned it down, how they need to get out of their current job and this is the only offer they have or for various reasons they feel that they don’t have any other options - ultimately, many arguments that make them feel like they “should” accept the job.

While I understand all those reasons - all those “shoulds” - if you want to enjoy your work, allowing them to be your sole motivation for accepting a job is not ideal. If you want to enjoy your work, you’re going to have to reflect on who you are, what you like doing, what cultures and environments you thrive in etc. and have those factors be of greater significance in your decision making. You have to make your happiness more of a gating factor.

Identify your motivations for accepting the job

If we want to know whether we’ll be happy in our next job, the one question we can all ask ourselves before accepting is, “Why would I be taking this job?” Take a deep look at your motivations and be very honest with yourself. If one of your top reasons or motivations is not, “because I’d like and enjoy doing this job,” then there’s reason to pause. So, if you’re going to accept primarily because of another reason, that’s fine, but if you can’t also say that you’d genuinely enjoy the job you may want to reflect on that before proceeding.

How to know if you’ll enjoy the job

For some, they may be very aware that they don’t really like the kind of work or job being offered. Others, myself included in the past, might be experiencing a bit of denial. All those shoulds can be so compelling and persuasive we can push down how we’re really feeling about the job or cleverly convince ourselves that we’d like it. But if we got really honest with ourselves we’d fess up that it’s a big no, we don’t really want to do the job. There’s also the camp of people who say, “Well, maybe I’d like it, I’m not sure, I’d have to see, I’ve never done it before and you can’t know until you try.” There are certainly instances where this can be true; but maybe, like above, those are more rationalizations to cover up what you already know. Just watch out for that and be really honest with yourself. And remember, no judgment here, I’ve been there too and see it in people I speak with often.

So, that’s how you can tell if it’s a no. But, how do you tell if it’s a yes, that you’d enjoy the job? In my experience, yes is a juicy feeling of “Yeah! This would be so great!” and a genuine excitement. Author and teacher, Kiran Trace, writes about finding your true yes in her book Tools for Sanity. She uses the word “delicious” to describe this kind of yes - where there’s an authentic inner movement of energy that gets you all jazzed up. You can feel in your body and on a gut level. So, when considering a potential job offer, tune in to see if you can find that.

Success through placing greater importance on your happiness

It’s a shame that our happiness and enjoyment of the work isn’t always at the forefront of our minds when making career decisions. Many of us have been taught that success leads to happiness and that success requires sacrifice and deferring our joy until it’s achieved. Whether we enjoy the work at hand seems to come as an afterthought in the quest for success. But, if we think it through, this line of reasoning implies we will be successful in working at something that we don’t enjoy doing, that’s not a good fit for us, and that we will find success by working against ourselves. I don’t think this makes any sense, do you?

Instead, if we make our enjoyment of our work and happiness a greater priority, the success we’re after is likely to come - and faster and with a lot more ease. And by then, we may even care about it less - we’re already happy and spending our days doing something we enjoy.