Why is “I hate my job” so difficult to work with?
One thing I keep coming back to in my coaching is how important it is to spend time intentionally working on your career, alongside the time you spend working in your job.
Part of that work is getting specific about your experience.
“I hate my job” is understandable. So is “I love my job.” They are simple ways to describe how we feel, and other people can relate to them. When you are exhausted or upset, breaking everything down into specifics naturally becomes a difficult job. It’s part of emotional regulation and emotional intelligence, being able to identify our true precise feelings beyond “I’m angry.” Because being angry is different from being Furious, Enraged, Betrayed, Violated, or Disrespected. All of those are feelings of anger but there’s so much more to do with each of those more precise presentations of anger.
But as starting points for making a change, those statements give us very little to work with.
What do you love? What do you hate? Which part would you want more of, and which part would you want to change?
Even a positive statement needs that detail. If you know you love your job but cannot explain what you love about it, how do you know what to look for in your next role?
In a previous article, we explored mapping the different parts of your profession. Here, we are going a level deeper: looking inside the work itself to understand which parts you actually enjoy.
Can a project you disliked tell you what you enjoy?
A useful place to start can be a project you did not enjoy.
That might seem like an odd choice at first, but that’s by design. When we attach an overall feeling to a project, we can lose sight of the different experiences inside it. And very rarely is 100% of any project, task, or assignment all bad.
Maybe the project was frustrating. Maybe it went badly. Maybe a large portion of the work was unpleasant. That does not necessarily mean every part of it was miserable.
The question I would start with is: Which parts of this did I actually enjoy?
You do not have to find a moment when you were overflowing with excitement or felt like you had discovered your life’s purpose. We are looking for something much simpler. Was there a part you liked doing? A conversation you enjoyed? A problem you were interested in figuring out? Someone you liked being in the misery with?
You do not have to change your overall opinion of the project to recognize those moments. We are trying to get specific enough to learn something useful from it.
What did you actually do?
Choose one project, assignment, or larger task, and write down the smaller activities that made it up.
Think through the stages and milestones. What happened at the beginning? What did you do in the middle? What did it take to finish?
For example, did you:
- Research a subject or interview people?
- Analyze information and look for patterns?
- Write a draft or develop something?
- Meet with people to make decisions?
- Present or share the work?
- Teach someone how to use what you created?
Also note the people involved in those activities. Who did you work with and at which stages?
The goal is to get past the single label you have attached to the project. “Developing new messaging,” for example, can contain research, interviews, analysis, writing, presenting, and teaching. Those are different experiences, even when they belong to the same assignment.
Once you can see those pieces separately, you have something more useful to reflect on.
How did you do each part of the work?
Next to each activity, write down how you approached it and the context in which it happened.
Did you work independently or collaboratively? Was there a clear structure upfront, or did you figure things out as you went? Did you use technology or AI to help? Was the assignment clearly defined, or were you working through ambiguity?
The activity is the what. The way you worked is the how.
That distinction helps us see that the activity can feel very different depending on how you do it.
Writing a first draft alone, with room to think and make your own decisions, is a different experience from writing that draft collaboratively while several people shape it at once. You might enjoy one and struggle with the other.
You can capture this in a simple table:
| What I did | How I did it | What I enjoyed or disliked, and why |
|---|---|---|
| Wrote a first draft | Collaboratively, following an agreed structure | Fill this in from your own experience. |
| Analyzed information | Independently, with room to explore | Fill this in from your own experience. |
| Presented the result | Shared it with a group and answered questions | Fill this in from your own experience. |
(Those are just examples of rows you might include. Use the activities and approaches that describe your actual project.)
Then look through the list and identify the parts you enjoyed. For each one, ask why. Was it the activity itself, the way you got to do it, the people involved, or some combination?
What if you cannot tell whether it was the activity or the approach?
Try changing one part of the picture in your imagination while keeping the other part the same.
Suppose you disliked writing a first draft through a structured, collaborative process.
First, imagine doing a different activity through that same process. If you were analyzing information with the group instead of writing, would you have enjoyed it more?
If so, that suggests the writing itself may be part of what you disliked.
Then try the other direction. Keep the writing, but change how you do it. Imagine writing the first draft independently, with autonomy over your approach, and bringing it back to the group afterward. Would that have been more enjoyable?
If so, the collaborative drafting process may have been the harder part for you.
You might discover that you enjoy an activity you had written off because you had mostly experienced it in a way that did not suit you.
How does this help you develop your craft?
The parts you enjoy become reference points for the kind of work you want to move toward.
If you enjoy analyzing information even inside a project you otherwise dislike, we want to find ways to lean into that in the future.
As you repeat this reflection, you can begin to identify the activities and approaches you want your craft to be anchored around. You are building a clearer picture of what draws you into the work.
That picture also helps you approach future projects differently.
You can ask where there might be room to do more of an activity you enjoy, change how a difficult part gets done, or reduce an element that repeatedly makes the experience unpleasant. You may not control every part of an assignment, but getting specific helps you see where a change might be possible.
“I hated that project” tells you how you felt about the whole experience.
“I enjoyed making sense of the information, but I struggled with writing the draft as a group” gives you something you can actually work with.
That is the level of understanding we are trying to build: knowing which parts of the work you want to carry forward, how you want to do them, and what you would like to change next time.
