I have a large collection of books throughout my house that at various points I have picked up, but never read through completely. These are typically non-fiction books, I love reading books about personal growth, faith, business, raising children- things like that. After my pondering last night about better choices, I decided that during any double whammy nap times I should do more reading, that it would be one small choice I could make to keep a flow of goodness coming into my life.
That being said, today I picked up a book by Clayton Christensen called How Will You Measure Your Life. It's a book that highlights research and theories (mostly from a business perspective, Clayton Christensen is a business professor at Harvard after all), with the aim to help the reader better understand how to find fulfillment and purpose in life.
One concept that stood out to me is that the opposite of job dissatisfaction is not job satisfaction, it is the absence of job dissatisfaction. He points out that something like paying an employee well doesn't give them job satisfaction, but it is important for helping to prevent job dissatisfaction. The factors that bring job satisfaction are "motivators", and these include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.
I read this and started to think about how motherhood fits into this concept. I can certainly think of things that would contribute to job dissatisfaction... things like my coworkers having temper tantrums, unreliable team schedules, unpleasant noises and smells, and straining physical burdens. My "working environment" is certainly different than that of my professionally employed days. I think that there will always be parts of motherhood that inherently cause some "job dissatisfaction", so it was comforting for me to believe that the existence of dissatisfaction wouldn't inhibit my ability to find greater satisfaction.
Today I have been spending some time thinking about those four categories of motivators; challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.
How can I increase these in my job as a stay at home mother?
Caring for children is inherently challenging, but I have noticed that often when I decide to take on a greater challenge, my job satisfaction increases. I'll give an example. Today the kids and I took a walk to a nearby park. I have never taken both of them to a park by myself before, I always had another adult with me, it just didn't seem likely to go well with me trying to handle both of them at once. But today we went, and it went wonderfully! Carolyn was happy to watch Peter play while staying [mostly] strapped into the stroller, Peter loved going down the slide again and again, and all three of us loved being outside for a couple of hours. Going to the park was a self imposed increase to the challenge of my work, and I unquestionably felt greater satisfaction afterwards.
I don't want to make this a mile long post so I won't talk about the other three categories right now, and I'm still formulating my ideas on them anyway. But, I would LOVE to hear any of your thoughts on those four "motivators" and how to work them into motherhood.Labels: Motherhood, Personal Growth