“I should wake up excited to go to work,” we tell ourselves. For many people, this feeling is so essential to our definition of what it means to have a great job that we don’t even question it. But is how much you look forward to going to work in the morning a barometer for how good your job is? This topic came up at a recent career group session and led to a really interesting discussion.

The question tends to elicit strong reactions from people. “Of course you should be happy to go to work!” people respond incredulously. That’s how I used to feel, too, but now I’m not sure how meaningful your enthusiasm for going to work each morning really is. I have a childhood friend named Alessia whose father was a teacher and a department head at a prominent children’s school and teacher’s college in New York. He loved his job more than almost anyone else I know. This is someone who would come home at the end of the day and say, without any irony, “I have the best job in the world.”

Yet, during our career group session, Alessia revealed that even her dad dreaded the beginning of the school year and didn’t particularly look forward to going to work each morning, either. His feeling was that you couldn’t only measure how good a job was by how you felt in the morning—the more important consideration was how you felt at the end of the day.

I think the question of whether you should like going to work derives from the fundamental tension of how your work relates to either your passion or your lifestyle (this needn’t be an either/or situation, but it often seems to play out this way). Some people are lucky to have a job where the can work on specific passions and be paid decently. My husband, who is a game designer and programmer, fits in this category. He loves video games and has wanted to be a game designer for most of his life, and now he is one. He still has occasional days where he doesn’t look forward to going to work, but his job contains an essential element of personal interest that means he anticipates it with pleasure most of the time. Other people, whose passions have no viable related careers, may have jobs that fit their skills and general interests, but are predominantly about supporting other activities or lifestyle choices. This can be great too, but does leave work feeling like, well, work and nothing else. For these people, the expectation of bounding out of bed to go to work each morning may never be realistic.

Of course, not being excited to go to work is not the same thing as dreading it. I think that the former is a reality of work for many people and not necessarily indicative of the overall fit or satisfaction level of the job. The latter is unbearable and, whatever the reason, an indication that significant change of some sort is necessary.

It turned out that few people in our career group actively look forward to going to their jobs each morning, even those who really like their jobs. Several said that, while they might not look forward to going to work, they felt content and accepting of it. At least one actively dreaded it. Many of us agreed that we often felt satisfied when we came home at the end of the day.

Even in cases where people dread their jobs, however, observing how you feel at the end of the day can still be a useful exercise. My friend Virginia illustrates this point perfectly. She is an attorney with an extraordinarily stressful work environment and a job that she is actively anxious about each morning, yet she often feels satisfied with what she’s accomplished at the end of the day. She doesn’t want to change her career or industry—she wants to get a similar job at a different firm that is a better fit for her personality. Her goal is to feel about going to work the way she feels about going to a yoga class.

“I am not always inclined to go to yoga class because it means getting dressed, leaving my house and walking to the studio,” she said. “I am also afraid that I will be tired or the class will be challenging. On the other hand, I feel calm about the prospect of going because I have had so many positive experiences with it in the past. I never dread it and, if I did, I wouldn’t go. Once I’m at the class, I enjoy it immensely. Even if some moments are unpleasant, I derive satisfaction from working through them and overcoming the difficulties. By the end of the class, I feel ecstatic about the fact that it is over and that I put myself through it. This is how I would like to feel about my job.”

For many people, work is not like the things they do for fun. Even if their work is like what they do for pleasure, the realities of commutes, salaries, and coworkers end up complicating the overall work experience of most jobs—even the ones that seem like they should be perfect fits.

Like many people I know, my job is a big part of my identity. This creates a lot of additional pressure to be really satisfied with work all of the time, even though that is not a reality of most jobs. I am always trying to figure out ways to make work feel less like work, mostly by continually trying to increase the amount of time I spend on the parts of my job that I enjoy, and minimize the time I spend on the parts that I don’t. Having said that, I can’t envision my work ever feeling enjoyable in the same way as the things I do solely for pleasure. I’m not sure that I’ll ever know whether this is due to to my personality—namely, feeling like nothing is as fun once it becomes an obligation—or because my job is not sufficiently aligned with my interests.

Assuming that the “right” job will leave you actively wanting to go to work each day is a colossal expectation that, for me, can lead to frustration. Instead, I try to approach the work day knowing that there will be challenges. I keep my expectations tempered. I think this helps me work through the obstacles that necessarily come up throughout the day without spiraling into irritation or despondency. In this way, having more moderate expectations for the day actually enables me to feel productive and satisfied when it’s over.

How satisfied you feel at the end of the day, rather than the beginning, certainly isn’t the only metric to consider when evaluating whether a job is a good fit, nor am I advocating everyone to settle on a job and to quit trying for something better. But by moderating our expectations of how we ought to feel at the beginning of the day and instead observing how we feel at the end of it, we may find more clues about what aspects of our jobs satisfy us, and ultimately feel more contented with what we’ve actually accomplished.

Leda Marritz lives in San Francisco.

My dear pal Steph was once described to me by a mutual friend of ours as someone who made you feel that anything was possible. And it’s true—whether it’s undertaking a complicated recipe for chocolate babka, reupholstering chairs, or taking impromptu trips, Steph is someone who has a lot of ideas, and a big, enthusiastic smile for every one of them. It makes you want to join her in whatever it is she’s proposing. After finishing a graduate program last year in urban planning and feeling somewhat dissatisfied with the freelance consulting work she was doing, she came to me with her latest idea: a career group for women. We sat down to plan.

The idea was simple: to gather a group of women who would meet regularly to support each others’ lives and careers by reading and discussing interesting books and articles, and by sharing thoughts, experiences, and resources. Steph and I hoped it might become something we’d want to participate in for the long-term, allowing us to track people’s career development through various life phases and jobs.

It needed to be big enough to be diverse, but small enough to still feel intimate and manageable. We ended up with a group of 11 friends, friends-of-friends, and acquaintances, ranging in age from 29 to 39, at various career stages: people who had been in the same industry their whole working life, people finishing grad school, people entering grad school, and people going through major career changes. Industries included law, nursing, teaching, sustainability, transit, game design, and a small business owner.

Initially, Steph and I thought we would organize each meeting around a theme and select a book or article relevant to that theme for everyone to read. We brainstormed topics and had no trouble coming up with possible areas of focus. An initial shortlist included mentoring, salary negotiation, feeling like a fraud, work/life balance, working with career coaches, setting boundaries, and following your passion versus letting passion follow you. In addition to the organized discussion, we wanted time to discuss personal questions or conflicts we were facing. In reality, the meetings didn’t run this way at all.

Part of the problem was that we all really liked each other. This meant that meetings quickly began to feel like opportunities to socialize. We would get sidetracked, sometimes for long periods of time, talking about a specific issue someone was experiencing, and fail to make it to the larger organizing theme. It’s not that these detours weren’t interesting—they were often engrossing. One really interesting one began when a member shared that she had been called a bitch by a female co-worker and wasn’t sure how she wanted to handle it. But while these conversations could be valuable, once they started happening at most meetings, we realized they were a distraction and that we needed to readjust our approach.

After several meetings of this, Steph and I thought it was time to talk as a group about what was working and the possible changes to make going forward. Everyone agreed that we needed to create a more focused, structured way to run the group that would make space for “big ideas” discussions as well as personal topics where we wanted the group’s opinion.

First, we agreed to set a specific day of every month for meetings. That way it was automatically in everyone’s calendar, and we didn’t have to go through a scheduling rigamarole for every session. If everyone couldn’t make it every time, so be it.

Next, we decided to take turns leading each meeting. Prior to this, Steph had mostly been in charge of scheduling meetings, proposing topics, and sending out reminder emails. This helped get everyone equally involved with the direction of the group and encouraged a sense of ownership over what we talked about. We waited until the end of each meeting before discussing what we wanted to address at the next one. Anyone can propose a topic; as long as enough people agree that it feels relevant, it’s a go. It’s up to the person who proposes that topic to pick a place to meet, supply snacks and drinks, and send out a reminder email to everyone, including any required reading or prep.

Our conversations are respectful, but that doesn’t mean we always agree. And while we’ve all gotten excellent advice, we aren’t always successful in implementing it. For example, I wanted to ask for a substantial raise and a title change last year. I anticipated that the title change would be easy. It was free for my boss to give me, for one thing, and my company—a small, family-owned business—doesn’t have formal rules set up for promotions. Asking for a big salary increase would be harder. I’ve been at my job for six years, but had never negotiated. Instead, each year when my review came around, my boss would simply tell my what my wage increase would be (if any), and I would nod affirmatively, relieved that the money portion of the discussion was over. I think he felt the same way. This time, I wanted to advocate for more.

Based on role-playing negotiations we’d done at one of our career group meetings, I met one-on-one with two members to practice. I decided to ask for the title change first. I figured that by getting my boss to agree that I deserved a title that more accurately reflected the scope of my responsibilities, segueing in to asking for a big raise would seem more natural. I probably role-played the negotiation three or four times total, and every time I was very nervous. (I highly recommend this exercise, but, even with friends, it is difficult.) Each time I did it, I refined what I wanted to say about my own performance and how I proposed being compensated.

I had my review a week or two later, but even with all this prep, my negotiation did not go as anticipated. It started with my boss requesting that we discuss my salary before addressing a title change. That flummoxed me immediately. Of all the many things I had practiced, this simple twist was not one of them. I could have pushed back and insisted that we start with a title discussion, but I didn’t feel comfortable doing that. Flustered, I agreed to his request and talked about my expanded responsibilities, concluding with requesting the new title I wanted. He demurred and said he needed time to think about it, another unanticipated response. I was zero for one and not feeling too great about things as we turned to the question of my salary.

As with years past, he told me that he wanted to raise my salary by a specific amount. At that point, I considered aborting the whole negotiation and just thanking him for the raise, as I had done every time before. He mentioned—tacitly discouraging me, which totally worked—that our line of credit with the bank was in jeopardy. I couldn’t imagine an artful way of pushing back and making the case for a larger raise, as I’d practiced, so instead I said that I had been planning to ask for more, and proposed that we revisit the issue in a few months. He agreed. The whole thing was over in about thirty seconds. It wasn’t how I hoped the discussion would unfold or conclude, but it was a step in the right direction. I realized that, more than anything, negotiations are about keeping the conversation going.

Many of the women in our career group share common questions and concerns like these. One thing that’s so interesting about it is observing people deal with similar situations in very different ways. For example, we have a few members who aren’t sure they want to stay at their jobs. Some, for various reasons, have decided to try to make the best of it and not look for other work. Others have concluded that they may never be satisfied and want to resume their job search. Few people are in careers because a passion for the work led them there. Even those who are in their supposed dream jobs aren’t sure that they make them happy. If our career group has made anything clear, it’s that there are no easy answers.

Leda Marritz lives in San Francisco. Photo: Wonderlane