For a lot of people out there, it happens the moment they show up for work. They open a “Vertical Coffin,” step in and shut the lid. For the next 8, 10, 12 hours they put their brain on hold. In reality, they are dead on the job … just going through the motions, waiting for the hours to pass so they can open the lid, step out, and start living again. They are miserable, dreading work every day and their performance shows it, their peers feel it, their customers see it, and their boss hates it.

It is such a travesty to spend your entire working life in a “Vertical Coffin” only to trade it in (at some point) for a horizontal one. Yes, for some people, as American actor and filmmaker Woody Allen once said, “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.” So, how can we fix this? Let’s start with one certainty: You can be miserable at work or you can be happy at work (the choice is yours) … but your workload is the same.

Sometimes we don’t appreciate just how good we have it. First and foremost, you have a job. There are millions of people who would love to have a job. The second thing you might want to consider is your work environment. During the Vietnam War, U.S Naval Captain (pilot) Gerald Coffee was shot down, captured and held prisoner for over 7 years in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” communist prison where torture and solitary confinement were routine. As a POW (Prisoner of War), Captain Coffee lived in a 4 foot by 6 foot cell, with a bucket in the corner for his toilet for 2,564 days. When he talks about his imprisonment, he said the first few months he was a POW (Prisoner of Woe). Woe is defined as great sorrow, distress, misery, sadness, unhappiness, despair, depression, regret, or gloom. Captain Coffee was wondering how could this awful misfortune happen to him? He said he had to turn his Prisoner of Woe attitude around if he was going to survive.

We all, at some point in our lives, become Prisoners of Woe. There are so many things that can give us that “Woe … poor unfortunate me” attitude: unfair boss, didn’t get our raise, never get recognized for a job well done, a person with less experience got “our” promotion, our office is too small, we didn’t get the corner office, we hate working in a cubicle, our break is too short, our boss plays favorites, we are always being criticized, and/or we have a heavy workload. We all need to appreciate that a good day for Captain Coffee was not getting beaten and a few more morsels of bread; compared to Captain Coffee, things should be looking a little better to all of us.

Being a Prisoner of WOE will do nothing to help our careers and make us successful. I promise you there are millions of people in the world who would give anything to change places with you. When we start appreciating what we have rather than what we don’t have, everything starts looking better. Misery is a feeling, a choice, a decision that “we” give value. Here are a couple of thoughts (author unknown) I would like to leave you with:

“It is not happy people who are thankful.
It is thankful people who are happy.”

“Appreciate what you have,
before it turns into what you had.”