Diana Alt [00:00:04]:
Hey, Diana Alt here. And this is Work Should Feel Good, the podcast where your career growth meets your real life. Each week I share stories, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you build a work life that works for you on your terms.

Diana Alt [00:00:26]:
Hey, everybody, Diana here, and welcome to the very first solo episode of Work Should Feel Good. This is something I've been wanting to add to the mix for a while because I do a lot of really in depth interviews with authors and other career services people and recruiters and coaches and real life people that are actually doing the thing of being at work in a corporate setting, plugging away, and sometimes they go 45, 50 minutes. I recorded one earlier this week that was like an hour and 20 minutes. And I don't regret doing those long interviews, but I want you all to be able to have some quick hits of information of how I'm thinking about careers and job searches and loving your life at work, as well as directly answering some specific questions. So today I want to get into a big question I get asked a lot, which is why did you pick Work Should Feel Good as your podcast name? And what does Work Should Feel good even mean? So the origin of actually the phrase work should feel good is me trying to start a Facebook page. Back in about 2019, or maybe early 2020, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I knew how to work Facebook. Guess I'm Gen X and we hang out on Facebook.

Diana Alt [00:01:44]:
But I started a business page for my coaching business. I put a profile picture of myself on there that was a headshot. And then I needed a background picture. So I went over into Canva, picked a background out of their images library, and then thought, I need to write something on this. And I just had it click into my head, let's write work should feel good. And that was my banner for a long time. And I had people ask me questions about it, especially a business coach that I worked with, Terry, who said, I don't know what the hell this means. Like, what does Work should feel good even mean? And I was trying to wrap my arms around what my business was going to be, what the focus of my coaching was going to be, how I was going to approach it.

Diana Alt [00:02:27]:
And so I couldn't really clearly explain it. I just knew that I had a fundamental belief that we should not feel like work is a long, slow march to oblivion. So I went with that for a while and I bought the domain name, not ever knowing what I was going to do with it. And then when I decided to start a Podcast back in February of this year, it's 2025. As I record this, I said, I need to use this. This needs to be the name of the for the podcast, because by this time I had figured out what it meant. It was the ethos of my business. And it means that work is supposed to be a place where we can express ourselves to and use our gifts and our skills and provide for our life at the same time while feeling as positive as possible.

Diana Alt [00:03:14]:
Sometimes that's a big challenge, especially if you're in a difficult workplace setting. But I wanted people to grasp onto that idea and choose it as kind of an ideal to pursue. So then that begs the question of how do I know what work that feels good is? Over the course of my years of coaching, I've noticed a lot of trends. Whether I was working with individual coaching clients looking for a new job or planning their career progression, or whether it was just a business client that I worked with, trying to help them with culture or hiring and anything in between, people brought up things that landed in one of four buckets, and those four buckets I turned into what I call my aligned career cornerstones. So very quickly, what the cornerstones are are, number one, right work, number two, right leaders, number three, right environment, and number four, right culture. So I'm going to quickly unpack a few things about that and talk a bit about what good might look like in this episode. So for right work, Right work is about what you're actually doing every day from when you log on at 8 to when you leave at 5, or whatever your working schedule is. It's about the tasks that you're doing and how you feel about doing them and what they are doing for your own development.

Diana Alt [00:04:40]:
So the first point is you want to spend as much time as possible doing work that energizes you. So once upon a time, I was a quality assurance testing manager in the software industry. I spent 20 years in software before I went full time into my coaching business. And I was pretty good at it. I was good as a quality manager. I was a really good tester too. And I got to the point where I absolutely hated it. I hated being at the end of the process instead of the beginning of the process.

Diana Alt [00:05:10]:
So that's an example where something that I was very good at became draining for me and it was no longer work that was good for me. Another aspect of the right work is that you're getting to build skills that you are wanting to get better at. So this is both from just pure personal interest and also about building skills that are not going to go obsolete. So as an example, in my case, I was a product manager for a long time and I loved being in product management. There's so much that I learned in product management that I use today in my business, both personally and also when I'm helping clients. And I always sought to build skills in product management, even outside my workplace if necessary. The last area to think about is the level of challenge. People that are really growth minded, like I always was when I was in corporate and I still am now as an entrepreneur, want to make sure that they are being challenged in their work, they aren't being bored to tears, and that's a thing to go for.

Diana Alt [00:06:17]:
But you also don't want so much challenge that you feel like you're set up to fail. It's a difference between having a stretch goal where you have some support from team members or management to learn those things and tackle that larger or new type of project. It's another thing when they throw you a hot mess or something ginormous and you don't have anyone behind you to help make that successful. So that's the right work. The next one is right leaders. And there's two basic dimensions of right leaders. The first one is your direct boss. We hear a lot that people don't leave jobs, they leave bad bosses, which is partially true.

Diana Alt [00:06:55]:
They also leave places where they can't develop their career. But your direct relationship with your boss is one of the most important things to your career success, to how you're going to move through and succeed at a company. You don't have to have the person be your best friend, your dream boss, perfect. But what you do need is someone that listens to you, that helps advocate for you, that challenges you when needed in healthy ways and that helps you develop in your career. And of course isn't, you know, micromanaging or toxic. The relationship that different people need with their boss differs though. The relationship I needed when I was 24 years old and fresh out of my graduate degree on my first job is much different than what I 20 years later when I was on the end of my corporate career. So this is highly individual to different people.

Diana Alt [00:07:48]:
The other area under leaders is it's the senior leadership of the company. So some people work very closely with those people. You know, if you're a vp, if you are, you know, in the C suite, you are working with a tip top of the CEO and the board of directors and things like that. But a lot of people are working in large companies farther down on the totem pole and never even talk to any of those people. It's still really important that the leadership is good at that level though, because if not, the company can kind of get driven into the ground. I mean, think about Blockbuster. Gen Xers love to talk about Blockbuster because it's based on technology that nobody even uses anymore. I don't even know if you can find a VHS player to play a video cassette like Blockbuster had.

Diana Alt [00:08:35]:
So you don't want a company that is making the wrong moves with strategy or getting behind right environment is about. It's kind of how your work and your life and your personality all work together. So on the personality part, it's kind of like about work styles. So some people really like a lot of structure. Some people want there to be a little bit more go with the flow. You want that sort of structure to match between how you like to work and how the company actually works. I talked to a prospective client earlier this week who works at a place that is okay, but he likes to move really fast. And they are very measured and conservative in taking making decisions and making changes.

Diana Alt [00:09:22]:
It's not a match for him otherwise. Other people might love that. Another thing is pay and benefits. You need to have both the pay and benefits that you need in order to live your life and build the life that you want for your family. And it also needs to be commensurate with your skills and experience both internally in the company and in the market. Some people care about this more than others, but it's a factor that you need to take into account. Similar thing for benefits, some people really need to have full health insurance benefits available to the whole family. Other people, it doesn't matter.

Diana Alt [00:09:56]:
But if you don't have the benefits that you need, then your lifetime at a company is going to be somewhat limited because you just again need that to live your life. Another key area is flexibility. So this is things like work from home versus work remote. Do I have to live in the same city as my office? Can I work anywhere on the planet? What hours do I have to work? All of those things. You need that to be right for you. One thing that's really surprising right now is there's been so much talk about returning back to the office after Covid in the last 18 months. In particular, a lot of companies where people had been working for three plus years fully remotely are bringing people back into the office. And what I'm hearing more and more in the last six months is that the people that thought they wanted all hybrid are tired of it, or sorry, all remote are tired of it.

Diana Alt [00:10:52]:
And they're now wanting to be in the office a couple of days a week. So some of these things can shift over time, which is another thing to consider. The last point is, right, culture. So I define culture very specifically as values in action within a workplace. So there's two aspects of culture to think about. Number one is, is there sufficient alignment between your values and the values of the company that you're working for? This varies by different people. Some people have worked with, they're like, as long as they're not actively killing people and stealing from people, I'm okay with, you know, my values are my own. I don't need my work to be 100% in line.

Diana Alt [00:11:34]:
Other people want that Venn diagram to look like a circle. This happens a lot with people who are in fields like ministry, non profits, mission based kinds of companies. The other category of this is how does the company's values show up every day? Are they just on the website or are there behaviors and standards and the company as a whole reinforcing what these values actually mean and then acting accordingly? One area that I've talked to people about a lot is there's a lot of companies that will say that they value diversity in their workforce. And a way that I can see whether that's actually true is to look at policies. So one area, I was working with a company that had said they valued diversity and they wanted people of all races and religions and things like that on their team. But they were not treating people specifically in the LGBT community very well because they didn't have policies and benefits to support things like adoption leave, medical leave for medical leave, and benefits for gender affirming care, things like that. If that's not important to you, that's fine. But you can see how we want people of every color of the rainbow on our staff and our benefits don't line up with that could be a problem.

Diana Alt [00:13:08]:
And so, yeah, that's basically the things. Another story about values that I had is I once worked for a company where accountability was value. It wasn't very well defined what that meant across the board, which was a problem anyway, but it tended to be used as a club against people. So we were very overworked. Our senior leadership had trouble focusing on a few things well, and instead tried to spread us way too thin. And then I remember people being told, well, if they said, I'm very concerned, like I don't know that we can do this. This is going to require me to have to work over Christmas or cancel a vacation or whatever. We would get clubbed over the head with accountability.

Diana Alt [00:13:49]:
They would say, well, accountability is a corporate value, so you need to figure out how to do that. And that of course was a problem. So that's, that's kind of the summary. The reality check on the four cornerstones is that it's actually somewhat rare to find a company where every single cornerstone actually is there. I know a lot of people that have maybe three out of four and the fourth one that isn't really checking all the boxes is not that important to them. They're making it work. I know some other people where they've got a cornerstone that's not working and they've got to get the heck out. Especially people who have a toxic leader or who just don't make enough money because they're at a company that doesn't pay appropriately.

Diana Alt [00:14:31]:
So if you are a person that is wondering, my gosh, I'm listening to all this stuff about these cornerstones, how is my workplace stacking up? What I would do is consider going over to. I made a little lead magnet training thing called is it time to walk? It's at cleverly named isittimetowalk.com and it takes you through some key questions and some additional behaviors that might be in place if it's time for you to really look at leaving a job. It talks about deal breakers where you should get the heck out no matter what. And it goes a little bit deeper into what it looks like to need to leave a job because the cornerstones are not met. So one thing that is not in that training, and I want to make sure that I'm clear about though, is jobs change and your needs change. So if something is missing in a job that you really want to work for you, I would ask yourself a question. Number one, is this a gap I can fill elsewhere? So sometimes, especially if you're not building a skill on the job, maybe you just need to do some continuing ed on your own to build that skill and to be able to say to your boss, I got this certification. Can I take a stab at it? Another thing to consider is the situation temporary or permanent? I have a friend that years ago told me he has what is he refers to as a six month rule.

Diana Alt [00:16:07]:
So when he is unhappy with something at work, he will start a clock for six months. He'll literally go on his calendar and mark six months from now, you know, am I still unhappy? And then he will start trying to work for change for his situation. So if the thing can be resolved, you're dealing with a temporary situation. But if there's no way that you can influence the thing that is not working for you, that's a permanent gap and you need to consider whether you should still stay there. So the cornerstones fundamentally are not, you know, etched in stone. They are not something that there's only one way to think about it. They're about clarity for individuals. And I hope you find the tool useful.

Diana Alt [00:16:49]:
I've been using it with people to help them figure out do they need to leave their job, also to help them evaluate job offers for years. And I do some work with entrepreneurs. And so we have stacked it up against the business that people are building to see how they're doing. It's a really useful tool in many different ways. So hope that helps you out and you deserve work that feels good. See you next time. Hey there. Do you ever find yourself wondering, is.

Diana Alt [00:17:18]:
It finally time to walk away from this job?

Diana Alt [00:17:21]:
You might want to go over and.

Diana Alt [00:17:22]:
Check out my free mini video [email protected].

Diana Alt [00:17:27]:
It'S going to walk you through the.

Diana Alt [00:17:29]:
Four pillars of an aligned career and let you know whether it's time to start making your move. That's isittimetowalk.com and that's it for this episode of Work should feel Good. If something made you laugh, think, cry, or just want to yell yes at.

Diana Alt [00:17:49]:
Your phone, send it to a friend. Hit follow, hit subscribe, subscribe, do all the things. And even better, leave a review if you've got a sec. I'm not going to tell you to give it five stars. You get to decide if I earned them.

Diana Alt [00:18:01]:
Work should feel good. Let's make that your reality.