I was browsing Reddit yesterday when I came across a thread all about bureaucracy at work.

As I read, I could feel my eyebrows rise.

One chap had spilled the beans on the email policy at his job. A policy which said that employees weren't allowed to send a single email to an external email address unless they manually typed the email address in the “to” box (rather than copy and paste it), then had someone check the email before they sent it.

Sounds about right.

By some unwritten corporate law, it seems there’s always stuff at work like this. Stuff that should be simple but somehow ends up being filled with friction.

For my first 13 years in the merry world of corporate banking, this wound me up.

In fact, watching perfectly straightforward things getting turned into obstacle courses like this REALLY wound me up.

I’d often sit in meetings with my arms folded and jaw clenched, mentally listing all the reasons why whatever we were discussing was a waste of everyone’s time. Then I’d smile politely at whoever was speaking and say “yep, that makes sense” while stewing in my own juices.

But these days when I stroll into Banking HQ, this stuff doesn’t wind me up. Even though nothing has changed about the bureaucracy inside the office walls.

In fact, I lap up this bureaucracy.

Without it, I doubt I’d have half the ideas I write about in these emails.

The strange thing about this?

If you asked me 10 years ago “Tom, could you genuinely love your job if all the stuff that winds you up about it stayed exactly the same?” then there’s no way on God’s green earth I would’ve ever said yes.

The friction in my job was the REASON I could never enjoy it.

But here I am today, getting permission to get permission to do things. And rather than that friction being the source of my misery, it’s a source of joy instead!

That’s why I like to think of the friction in my day job as the grit in an oyster.

Without that grit, the pearl would never form.

Funny how things turn out.

Anyway, I can see how this could be read as “just start a newsletter, write about your job and suddenly it will stop winding you up”.

But that’s not what I’m getting at.

I’m not loving the friction at work because I’m writing about it. Instead, the writing has helped me notice that I can look at my job rather than being stuck in my job.

When I’m standing inside a frustration, it feels heavy and solid.

But the moment I step back and think “this is interesting” or “I wonder what’s going on here”, I’ve shifted position.

I’m not in the frustration now. I’m observing it instead.

The key bit for me is that the same events look completely different depending where we stand in relation to them. As the Father of Motivation Wayne Dyer supposedly said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”.

I don’t know if that sounds obvious or like a load of old cobblers.

But I can’t emphasise enough what a difference this idea has made to my working life.

If there's something about your career you're stuck in right now, my Career Clarity Coaching gives you 30 minutes to step back and look at it, rather than staying stuck inside it.

You can find out more about it here:

https://tomgrundy.coach/career-clarity-coaching/

To fulfilment,

Tom