Staying Passionate About Your Job

By: Andrea Schuch

A few years back, I participated in a Leadership course (I may have mentioned this before). And although staying passionate about your job does not directly link with leadership, one of the lessons from the course that I remember is the fact that when a person is in their late teens or early twenties, you think about what you want to do with your life; generally you finish this list before your 40's, then what? There are many designers who are very young and very successful – how do they continue to be passionate about what they are doing to continue it for years to come? What if this is your second career - but you want this one to stick around for a while? I believe the answer is education. To continue attending events and seminars, maybe learn something about how you can alter your ways of doing business for the better. There are designers that I have talked to, such as Lisa Bonneville (click here to view my interview with her) who has continually evolved her business over the years and because of that, she is still so passionate about what she does. She went from interior design to focusing on design for disabilities and aging, and now hoping to use the nature-based patterns she draws as an interior element.

It’s too easy to lose steam when you keep doing the same thing over and over again. I don’t think it matters what your profession it – burn out almost seems inevitable. Unless you learn to avoid it. That’s even more reason to keep changing things up! I think that there are several ways to “keep the steam” That’s the great thing about events like the annual markets in High Point – it’s so energizing to be there and see designers from all over excited about the way design is headed, new product, new colors, new ideas. Local show houses are often very exciting and great for group outings.

No matter what your position or job, it’s often nice to have the camaraderie of others in your position, even though you might not have co-workers that have the same title, you can often find people in other companies that do hold that position - sharing stories, theories and getting advice from these people can often be the best form of therapy there is! For instance, in our industry, if you are a sole business owner – find some other owners, in the interior design industry or not. The information you will get out of groups like this is invaluable. It is important to have people you trust in these groups because you will want to be able to share the way your company works with them so they will understand your point of view.

Change your tune… Doing the same thing over and over again can be too repetitive for some. Think about that one thing that you really love about your job and then think about how you can do more of it. Maybe it means having someone else do the yucky parts or maybe it just means that you are changing your specialty – maybe you focus more on older homes – restoring the furnishings to their original state versus full home design for new construction. Maybe you focus on speaking to other business owners or designer – much like our speaker next week Terri Taylor. Terri has her design company, Taylor Design Group, (click here to read her article on our blog) of which she has run for 30+ years. Whenever she had a question about running her business, she found no answers, schools often do not teach more than one business course - leaving this important subject in dire need of help. She decided to take the lead and help designers learn better ways to run their businesses. She still practices design but also works in this interesting trade related position. Of course, I realize that we can’t always get away from the less fun parts of our job, but maybe we can change the way we do them to make them a little less complaint-worthy. And since we're really loving our jobs now - and staying passionate about our career paths, the less-fun parts seem a little more, well.... fun!

Let us know what you do to ensure you don't loose steam in your job!