If “quiet quitting” was your workplace buzzword for 2022, then maybe this year’s more optimistic trend—quiet thriving—might just be the positive outlook you need.
By the end of last year, it seemed like we were all quiet quitting something, be it our relationships or our jobs. That is, doing the bare minimum in a situation that you don’t believe is serving you or rewarding you in the way you feel you deserve. But while it’s a tempting thought to mentally check out of your job, it can actually have a pretty negative effect on your mood and may even make you feel even more unfulfilled at work. So, introducing the antithesis to quiet quitting: quiet thriving.
Coined by psychotherapist Lelsey Alderman in an article for The Washington Post, the term “quiet thriving” means actively making changes to your work day in order to shift your mental state and help you feel more engaged in your job.
As neuroscientist and success coach Laura Ellera tells Glamour UK, it isn’t really in our nature to do the bare minimum at work. “Let’s be honest, it’s not always possible to just up and quit our jobs when they are causing us distress, even though we might want to,” she says. “We can choose to settle into just getting by and practicing quiet quitting, but this in the long run will not be best for your mental health.”
She continues, “We are built to thrive as human beings—we are naturally inquisitive and even if we say we’re happy just doing the bare minimum until something better comes along, deep down we feel that lack of purpose. We notice the clock ticking as our careers seem to drift by us. We are nagged by that feeling that there’s got to be more to life than this.”
“Even if you could leave that role, you may not find the fulfillment you crave if you haven’t worked on yourself first. No job alone will give us that deep down satisfaction that we all desire. We want to make a difference. We need to be appreciated. There is a drive to reach our full potential, whether we care to admit it to ourselves or not. So quiet quitting, while it may feel like sticking two up to the establishment, is actually doing the same right back at you.”
For Laura, quiet thriving allows us to take back control of our wellbeing at work—and it involves two elements: “The mental switch that we need to work through in order to see our career from a different, more positive angle, and the physical actions we take in order to shape the reality of the role into one that makes us excited to go to work again.”
Here’s how you can try quiet thriving for yourself…
Take back control
“A great place to start is to think about which parts of your job frustrate you, and which parts light you up,” says Ellera. “Really get clear on the different aspects of your role and what they mean to you. Then take the parts that frustrate you and ask yourself honestly, which parts of this do I have control over? Which parts do I have some influence over? And which parts are completely out of my control?
