Remember the times when you just fresh out to work, you were filled with energy, drive and enthusiasm. But, as times go by, you might find all your hard works and contribution are not appreciated by your company as much as you expected. You beginning to lose interests and passion for your job, soon you become unhappy and dissatisfied of your job.

According to a job satisfaction survey by HRM Guide, the job satisfaction for the age group of 35 and above has been declining since year 2005. The main reason is not only caused by job but other factors as well, such as, family, health and marriage problems. Mature professionals are normally sandwiched between work and family. Most of you could be at managerial or executive level when great responsibilities and expectations are required at your workplace. In addition, the heavy burden at home to take care of your family needs and aging parents’ health are another contributing factors. Majority of the mature professionals also have to deal with rebellious teens’ behavioral and educational problems.

Once you have lost your job satisfaction, you will feel stuck and your career will become stagnant, there are no more joys and satisfaction going to work everyday. If no action is taken to rediscover your job satisfaction, it is going to affect many aspects of your life. Below are some steps that could help you to reignite your lost job passion and move forward quickly. Give it a try!

Identify the Root Cause
First, find out what are the things that are bothering you? Things that make you unhappy with your job, list them down, think of solution and take action to fix them. You may find that you may have a list of problems so set priority of what you want to achieve first. The priority must also align with your career goal and personal life. For example, you cannot have new challenges in your job and at the same time want to spend more time with your family.

Aligning your goals with personal priorities will ensure less conflict and confusion thereby making your life more smooth sailing. Ultimately, you will have more peace of mind which help you to focus on your job more effectively.

Seek Professional Help
Sometimes, when you are stuck in the mud for too long, it blurred your visions thus affect your ability to judge well. You should seek professional help either from your HR department or external career coach for advice early. These professionals could offer you valuable insights which you might have overlooked and help you to restore your passion for your job.

Revisit Your Goal
Your daily busy work schedule may have drowned your goal that you have set long ago. It is high time you revisit your goal and check where you are now and where you want to go. Doing so will help to uplift your spirit as it goes through a soul searching and reflecting process.

Identify the shortcoming and see what can be done to help you to reach your goal faster. If it was due to lack of job advancement in your company or mismatch in skills, do you want to look for new job opportunity or venture out on your own? Keep a constant check on your goal will help to rediscover your passion and satisfaction you have long forgotten.

Learn New Skills
At times, you must have realized your lack of certain skills would hinder you to perform well in your job. Or it could be there are skills that you would like to learn but just lack of time. Make your decision today and take action for your long-overdue skills training. As we know, skills have short lifespan especially in this technological age so learning new skills should be a constant investment.

You will soon realize that learning new skills will not only give you new confidence level but also increase your work efficiency. The once-seem daunting tasks can now be solved with so much ease.

Sort Out Your Personal Life
According to a study findings published by Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, there is a causal link between job satisfaction and life satisfaction. It stated that if you are unhappy with your life, it is less likely you will find satisfaction in your job. Being the middle-aged person, you will encounter more family, marriage and health problems than ever. Such problems may spillover to your job and affect your work performance thereby job satisfaction.  

You need to seek help early. Sometimes it could be due to lack of communication, you should try to communicate frequently with your spouse or family members. Let them understand your thoughts and at the same time, try to understand their thoughts. Many problems should be solved by just opening out to each other.

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Very often when things are sorted out and moving forward, you will find yourself gaining back new confidence and happiness in your job. It might not be easy to find back all the past job happiness but your attempt will be rewarded. Once you rediscover your job satisfaction, you should feel fulfilled and happy again of working everyday. You can tell the differences by seeing the reactions from the people around you.

What techniques do you used to rediscover your job satisfaction? If you have any success, please share it at the comment below.

If you are, like me, sharing your home office with your bedroom, you may encounter similar problem like where to draw the line between rest and work? Your working space is only a few steps or just a crawl from your bed; it could cause considerable disruption to your spouse or your sleep. For some, your bed could be too tempting not to be missed while you are working and this may affect your work productivity. 

Another problem of sharing the bedroom with our home office is lack of space. With limited space I can’t afford bulky furniture in my bedroom, in fact, I literally do not have any decent storage for my files. I would also very much like a L-shape desk for my working space as one desk for my big monitor and another for doing paper work but this could be too overcrowding. 

In addition, my business partners and customers sometimes would pop over my home office for a quick chat as it was hard to find a quiet place for business discussion outside. However, I could see that they felt rather uncomfortable doing it in my home office cum bedroom as they felt they were intruding my privacy.

I thought this could be a problem I must bear with it for sometimes before I could afford a proper office. However, after watching this amazing video from Resource Furniture, it truly opened up my mind on how we can optimize limited space with creative space-saving furniture. You can click on the video below and start watching now.

They cleverly played with the design of furniture and called them “space savers”. Their furniture are designed for more than one use, for example turning a coffee table into a dining table or converting a sofa into a bed. I especially like the part where they can hide the bed either by flipping over and become a work space or turn it over to become a cabinet. As we know,the bed occupies the most space in the bedroom, once it is being hidden away; it creates so much extra space for working now.

I am excited by the idea as it could be one best way of solving my problems of sharing my bedroom with home office. Just imagine, every morning once I got out of bed, I could quickly transform my bedroom into home office instantly. A home office truly exists all by itself without any bed or other related bedroom accessories in sight. This will not only help to reduce the awkwardness of having business partners or customers when they are visiting me but also increase my business image. Moreover, I could hide away my work space at night while I sleep, giving me more peace when my computer is out of sight.

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I hope the video above will give you some ideas and inspiration of how to create or improve your home office. Having dual-purpose furniture will certainly help to increase your space and productivity but the cost of such space-saving furniture may not come cheap. Nevertheless, it definitely gives us a better idea of how we can optimize our limited space.

I wish you best of luck in creating or improving your home office. If you have other creative ideas of how to solve the problems of sharing your bedroom with your home office, please share it at the comment below.