Tired of the daily grind? Then try to look at it with a different view.

A usual conversation happening right now in some part of the world –

“Hey, how are things going for you?”

“Things are going as usual, just the daily grind on my end. What about you?”

“Just the grind here as well!”

How many times have you heard this or said this to another person when asked about your day, your work, or just how things are going in general? Everyone seems to be “going through the grind” or “grinding it out”. Does it make you feel good when you hear this response from others? Do you feel good when you tell this as an answer?

Being Ground Down Daily

If you look up online, the meaning of the word “Grind” the following comes up — “Reduce to small particles or to rub against” or “hard dull work”.

So the word literally means to break something down to smaller parts or hard and dull work. No wonder, I never felt good whenever I told someone that I was going through the grind. I really did not feel like I was truly describing my efforts. It always left the proverbial bad taste in my mouth.

This feeling did not sit well with me and so I started thinking about this a little more deeply. That is when I really started focusing on the actual meaning the word is trying to convey and realized that it is the word that I am using to describe my efforts that is making me feel a certain way about the efforts I put in. I know we have all read how our thoughts become words, words become deeds and deeds become your destiny etc. But this was one time that it really made sense to me. It hit me clearly.

It was the choice of the word “Grind” to refer to my day to day work that was leaving an unsettling feeling within me. It was making me feel like “I was the one who was being reduced to small pieces as I put in the effort”. It made me feel like my work was dull and boring and hard. I was unintentionally feeding my mind with disempowering self talk because of the choice of my words. Specifically referring to my actions every day as the “Grind” was causing me to feel like my days were dragging along.

One thing was sure, I knew if I continued this way, I would definitely feel like I was being reduced to pieces under the dull and hard work that I am doing on a day to day basis. Not a place I or anyone else would want to be.

To be honest, I don’t think the work I do is something I hate. Else, I would not want to do it at all. I chose to be in the field I am. I chose to start a blog and share my thoughts and experiences with the world. Now I knew this would come with a huge amount of work, but I also knew that I would be learning a lot and the work in itself would be enriching to me personally. Yes, the work is sometimes hard and sometimes repetitive, but I always look at the things I do as a way forward, as a step to reach somewhere and as a brick laid to build something bigger. Thus, the conventional accepted social reference of “Grind” to refer to my soul enriching, self worth defining (Ok, am being a little dramatic here) work did not fit well with me.

There should be a better and more enriching way to describe our daily efforts and work. How come we all accepted and settled for “Grind”? As if we needed any more depressing words in our day to day vocabulary to drag us down.

Search for a new word begins

I am sure a lot of you out there also feel this way as well. You enjoy your work, in fact love it. You show up everyday and love doing the best you can and yet when you talk about it to others, your go to vocabulary is “Grind”. So I had to search for another word. Something more meaningful, less harsh sounding and more in line with the positive way in which I think about my work and efforts.

I didn’t have to go too far to look.

I went straight to where the word “Grind” was last used by me in an academic setting. The word Grind, also referred to as the process of Grinding, brought to my mind manufacturing processes. I have a bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing 101 was a course we all need to cover in order to graduate. One of the topics in that course is various manufacturing processes. So I started looking at other manufacturing processes that were explained in the textbook to see if there might be one that would help me better define my work. After all “to manufacture” is “to create, build or construct”. So why not look at other processes that might define my work better.

Goodbye to Grind and Hello to Hone

That is when I came across the process of Honing. The word that I narrowed on was “Hone”.

If you look up the meaning of the word “Hone”, this is what shows up — “Sharpen” or “Refine or perfect (something) over a period of time”.

When I read this meaning, I felt my body go light, I could feel the stars aligning and I could hear the heavens singing (Ok, I really need to stop the drama).

I realized, this is what I should have used all along to refer to my day’s work. Not grind, but hone. That is what I really felt I was doing when I went through my day to day tasks. I was honing my craft, my skills, my blog post content and my SEO skills. This was a more accurate way to describe what I thought of my own work.

That is exactly what every seeker, saadhak (a term used to mean seeker in the language Sanskrit), anyone who undertakes any discipline or quest is doing. They are slowly sharpening their skills and over a period of time refining and perfecting their skills to reach their goals and destinations.

The word “Hone” somehow did not have the heavy cumbersome weight I felt when I used the word “Grind”. It felt light. It felt positive and it felt like I was going in the direction I intended. Not a feeling of being weighed down and crushed like the former reference “Grind” always made me feel.

The Power of One Word

So I immediately switched my vocabulary and started conscious efforts to use the word Hone. This has not only changed the way I look at my work and feel about it, but has also helped me cope with failures better as I know that the process of honing takes time and that perfection is not achieved overnight.

This exercise to consciously change the way I refer to something resulted in changing the way I see it as well. It was definitely one of those times in my life where I felt the “Power of the Word” as they call it. The very way in which we refer to or call things has a subtle but powerful impact on our psyche about how we perceive the object, event or person we are referring to.

Hope you also say goodbye to the grind and start to feel more happy honing your skills and effort to achieve what ever it is you are seeking.