17 Oct if you don’t have passions outside of work you really should have. here’s why…
via Inc.com by Jessica Stillman
When we want to improve at work, it’s natural to focus on what’s going on at the office. But while industry books, scheduling hacks, and the like are a great way to try and get ahead, science suggests that what we do outside the office can actually have an incredibly large impact on our professional success.
A boatload of studies shows that cultivating a hobby in your off hours isn’t just a fun way to fill up your evenings and weekends. Having a passion outside of work has surprising benefits that carry over into your professional life, making your life not just more fun, but more successful too. Here’s how a getting a hobby will help you:
1. It will boost your performance at work.
The simplest reason to get yourself a hobby comes from recent research out of San Francisco State University. Whether the psychologists behind the study examined professionals or Air Force pilots, they saw the same pattern. Having some sort of creative passion outside of work makes you better at your job – 15 to 30 percent better to be exact. (The researchers defined ‘creative’ loosely to include anything from painting to knitting.)
“We found that in general, the more you engage in creative activities, the better you’ll do,” summed up lead author Kevin Eschleman.
2. It will increase your confidence.
Not only will having a serious hobby outside work likely make you better at work, it will probably give you more swagger too. That’s the conclusion of a new British study that asked people not just if they had a hobby, but how dedicated to it they were. The researchers discovered that the more passionately people pursued a hobby, the more confident they felt about overcoming challenges in other areas of their life.
There was one catch to keep in mind, however. This confidence-boosting effect only held when a person’s hobby was dissimilar from their work. If you’re an aeronautical engineer building model rockets in your free time isn’t going to do much for you, but rock climbing or improv comedy will help you be a little more fearless…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE