When you’re a working mum, you often feel torn. You feel like you should be spending more time with your children, but you also know that you have to support them to give them the best possible life, and often that means putting a lot of time and effort into your career.
No one should feel guilty about working and raising a family but if you do happen to feel that way, one thing that can really help is finding ways to make your work feel more meaningful.
When work doesn’t just feel like the thing you need to do to earn money, it can be a lot easier to juggle working responsibilities with family responsibilities and feel good about both.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few things you can do to make your work more meaningful right now:
Think about the good stuff it enables you to do
If your job enables you to ensure there is always healthy food on the table for your family or it enables you to pay for a tutor so your kids can reach their potential, or it means you can afford more fun family activities together, remember that whenever you are feeling disheartened. Being able to earn money means you can give your family more opportunities in life, and that is about as meaningful as it gets!
Think about how your job helps people
Some jobs, such as live in care jobs that enable you to support vulnerable people or conservation roles that enable you to make a better world for your children, may seem inherently more meaningful than others, but whatever you do, chances are you are helping someone and it is a good idea to focus on that.
For example, if you work in a supermarket, you are ensuring that people are able to access the food and supplies they need to feed their families or if you work as a builder, you help to ensure that people have safe homes to live in. There is always more depth of meaning to be found in any job and remembering that will really help.
Get to know your co-workers
Fostering positive relationships with your co-workers is another good way to make work more meaningful. When you get to know the people you work with and form strong bonds with them, then work isn’t just the place you go to earn money for a few hours, it is the place where you will also find lots of support, comradeship, and make lifelong friends, all of which are important for your own mental health and wellbeing, and will see you well when the kids grow up and leave home to start building their own adult lives.
When you find youtube work more meaningful, it is more enjoyable, and as a parent, it is a lot easier for you to reconcile your work life with your family life too, so why not work on bringing more meaning into your job right now: