I had an interesting conversation the other day with a Thinking Lab member who has hated his job off and on for a long time and wants to do something constructive about it.

The key word here is “constructive.” People “hate” all kinds of things: the culture, how their families treat them, organizations they disapprove of. As long as they stay in complaining and blaming mode, nothing material will change.

The foundation of constructive change is your realizing how much control you have over your emotional reaction to any situation. Except in unusual circumstances, you don’t need a new job to be happy. You need a new perspective on your own choices and actions, one that fuels pride, confidence, and joy in whatever you are doing.

Verify it is honest work

That said, there is a minimum needed to be able to be happy at a job. The work you are doing needs to be productive. This means that you see the objective value of what you’re contributing to the company and the company is engaged in trading values. There is no fraud. It is “honest work.”

So, for example, Walmart has “customer hosts” who are near the door when you come in. They can help with directions and returns, and they also provide some security. These actions are valuable contributions to both the customer and the corporation. The business is transparently offering products for sale. It doesn’t matter whether you like all of its business practices, or its personnel, or its salaries, or its prices. I like Walmart a lot, but not everyone does. But the jobs there are honest work.

The person I was talking to was in sales. Salespeople provide a crucial value to customers and companies when they work to understand the customer’s needs, then figure out (and explain) how the company product can meet those needs (if it can). (A salesperson who manipulates people into buying is not doing honest work.)

My Thinking Lab member understood this and dealt with his customers honestly. But although he was good at it, he didn’t enjoy the process. Also, he had worked at several companies, but he didn’t like the companies.

As a salesperson, you do need to validate the company and its offerings, in that you need to be sure that what you’re selling will be delivered. You need to know enough so that you don’t overpromise, since your integrity is on the line. But for most cases, including the ones we talked about, the company is providing an honest service. Selling for them is honest work.

If you are engaged in honest work, there are many values you can gain while performing your job. If not, if the company is fraudulent or demanding you be dishonest, it’s a no-brainer ethical issue. You do need to quit and find some honest work, even if the new job is something you “don’t like.”

Take your decision to work there seriously

If you do take a job you “don’t like” because you “need the money” and have “no choice,” your attitude toward your decision is a big part of the problem. You need to take full ownership of your action. It is not true that you have “no choice.” You always have a choice.

When you feel forced into a decision to take a job, it means you need to seriously look at the negatives of not taking the job. My Thinking Labber joked about being homeless if he didn’t work, but homelessness is no joke. If you really need the money to avoid foreclosure, you need to seriously look at what happens in your life if you don’t take the job.

It is not fun to look at the worst-case scenario. But this is part of accepting reality. Your choices have consequences, and in order to make sure you make the best choice possible, you need to look at any predictable negative consequences in harsh detail. You need to do this so that you can see clearly the value of having some but any job.

The truth is that when you think you have “no choice,” what you mean is that you think the choice is a no-brainer. There is no good argument for the other side. But unless you look at the negatives of not taking the job, you cannot clearly identify the values of taking it.

Indeed, in order to make a rational decision about whether to take a job or not, you need to examine more than just the pros and cons on each side that occur to you. You need to translate all of the data into terms of values at stake. This is needed to activate the full context and reach certainty. I discuss this process here and here.

Introspect your emotions — especially threat-oriented emotions

The choice to analyze threat-oriented motivation to find values at stake is needed to make the original decision to take a job, and essential to making the work on the job tolerable.

Whether you are happy in everyday, non-emergency situations is really up to you. I talk about this at length in my series on happiness. The essential skill is: orienting to values. “Orienting to values” has two parts:

1) Fully introspecting one’s emotions to validate their underlying evaluations and judge whether they are relevant.

2) Embracing your choice in the moment to go after the biggest value available to you right now in these circumstances.

It’s important to feel all emotions. Emotions are based on your past choices, actions, and experiences that appear relevant at the moment. As I explain in this article, they should be thought of as alerts to values of yours that seem to be at stake. This is important information — because gaining and keeping your values is the work of life.

But the emotions are not always based on relevant information, and the values they represent are not always obvious.

An emotion might be an “out-of-context” emotion. This means that additional relevant information would change your evaluation. One reason to introspect them fully is to make explicit all of the implicit factors in the emotion. This ensures that your most relevant knowledge is activated, which maximizes your ability to make a rational judgment.

This is your chance to bring in relevant information — such as the nature of honest work and the fact that you always have a choice.

Fully introspecting your emotions is particularly important when you feel a threat-oriented emotion like fear, anger, frustration, guilt, or aversion, especially if it includes any hatred or hostility. It takes a little emotional resilience to look beneath those unpleasant emotions to see what they mean and whether the underlying evaluation is true and relevant or not. But since these emotions can be defensive, it is essential to your happiness that you examine them.

If an emotion is defensive, it is superficial and it diverts the issue from what you’re actually upset about. You really don’t know what that is until you have gotten to the fundamentals — the values that are truly threatened and why.

Fight for your values

Once you know all of the values at stake, you are in a position to fight for your values. This is the source of joy, pride, and confidence that you can get every day doing any honest work.

To make up an example based on the idea of wanting to play videogames instead of doing your work, suppose you introspect that feeling and discover (unsurprisingly) that you’re bored and are wishing for entertainment and adventure. Well, that then becomes a creative challenge. How can you do the same task you’re doing now but make it a more entertaining, richer experience? This takes some thinking, but it is worth it. Every job can be made better, more useful, more interesting if you put your mind to it. If you gamify the boring process, you can get more people to do it. (Think Tom Sawyer.) If you get curious about why it’s done exactly the way it’s done, you will find rich intricacies in the work process that you never dreamed of — and ways to improve it or make it more efficient. All of that is more interesting, more entertaining, and more rewarding. It can make going to work a bit adventurous.

This may sound stretched, but that’s probably because this is an unfamiliar skill. The critical middle step is to name the values you are longing for in terms of “Deep Rational Values.” If you are genuinely longing for a value, naming it more abstractly unleashes your creativity. (I teach this life-giving process in several classes in the Thinking Lab, mainly the one on “Self-Direction.”)

I have been fortunate enough to work for myself for the last 25 years. But as any solopreneur will tell you, it is not “fun.” It’s often grueling work. The main way I maintain my benevolence and remain committed despite difficult times is to find a way to fight for my values, every day, especially if I temporarily “hate my job.”