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The month of February is widely celebrated as the month of love.
Legend has it that Saint Valentine was a Roman priest in the third century. The then emperor of Rome believed that single men made better soldiers, making him pass a decree forbidding the young from getting married. Saint Valentine, in defiance of this decree, continued to get young lovers married in secret. Eventually his actions became known to the emperor and the Saint was put to death on 14th of February.
The fact that Valentine’s Day is now celebrated across the globe, making it the second most popular card-sending festival next to Christmas, is a testimony that love is all-pervasive and it cannot be contained. How, then, does this emotion manifest itself at our places of work?
I have often heard people say that you shouldn’t fall in love with the organization that you work for, for the organization is not capable of loving you back. It won’t blink an eyelid if there is a need for it to let you go.
But isn’t that true for every other human relationship? When the need to end a relationship arises, how many bonds are brittle enough to endure it? The question is, what can we do to make our relationship with our organizations more enduring? And the answer to this is love.
Most successful professionals I know are people who are in love with what they do, where they work and the people that they work with. It is this love, or passion, as it is sometimes termed, which ensures that such individuals remain at the top of their game at all times. These people are willing to adapt and learn and fold their sleeves in the wake of any external challenges that their organizations face. They are in a harmonious relationship with their organizations, and there is no reason why the organization will ever feel the need to part ways with them.
While finding the right job or the right organization is a matter of search – its only you who can decide where your calling lies – a major hindrance in establishing a romantic relationship with our workplace is our outlook towards work. Often, we are guilty of relegating our sensitivities and our emotions to the personal sphere, approaching work with as much objectivity as we can muster.
“I stop thinking about work as soon as I step out of office,” one of my colleagues often says. Imagine, if you approached any of your personal relationships with similar degree of detachment, would it ever last? Why then shouldn’t we be a little more involved with something that takes up more than half our waking hours?
A healthy and committed relationship with our work and workplace might hold more rewards for us than we can imagine. So, are we then ready to invest in this relationship and rekindle the romance?
First published in Suburb Life Magazine, February ’19 Issue.