Your Passion For Work – Obsessive or Harmonious?

passion for work

What type of passion for work do you have? If it is obsessive, it might not be healthy for you, and you should be considering a more harmonious path. This path also means balancing your passion for work and your paycheck. Many lawyers practicing during the pandemic used some of the time for introspection and to better understand themselves and what makes them happy. If you have not done this already, you should break out some time to do so. With the rise of remote legal jobs – including remote General Counsel jobs – there is ample opportunity for practicing lawyers to start to regain control over their schedules and add wellbeing-focused hours back to their daily routines.

“There are two kinds of passion associated with work, and only one of them is beneficial. There is obsessive passion, in which people are “inflexibly, excessively and compulsively committed, finding it difficult to disengage,” according to cognitive scientist and personality psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. These people risk burnout, he writes at the HBR Blog Network. And there is harmonious passion, in which people feel in control of their work, feel good about themselves while working, and find their work is harmonious with other activities.”

Read: Are You Obsessively Passionate About Your Work? If So, You Risk Burnout, Expert says at the ABA Journal