During one of the consultations, a client casually dropped the phrase “Work should be fun.” Well, he said and said, and it doesn’t seem to directly relate to the stated problem. But my attention did not let this escape, in the end we discovered an interesting rule that the client used not only in relation to work, but in other areas of life. People are not fully aware of most of their beliefs, and when they talk about something, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I want to show with an example how you can go down from this top and discover the base. The words a person uses to express their problem often reflect how they think about the problem. And the way a person thinks about it is often the reason why the problem is not solved and persists. What the client communicates implicitly by saying “work should be fun.” Some “doors” to get down to the root cause of the problem: 1. Now work does not give him pleasure. Have you delivered before? What has changed?2. Instead of “I work and don’t get pleasure from it” there is an abstract “work should give pleasure.” Passive position and waiting for what? 3. Pleasure - stated as the main criterion; no pleasure - it will be difficult to work; it will not work? 4. Fear or any other limitation hidden behind the word “should”. Something in the client’s worldview forces him to put “pleasure” first. What? I decided to explore the fourth point with a question to identify boundaries: what will happen if work does not bring pleasure? And I received the answer: it will be lost time. This is our foundation. We put it all together and we get: work should be enjoyable, otherwise it’s wasted time. And it’s very good: if I work and don’t have fun, then I’m wasting time. I’d like to note that time is something very valuable and significant in the client’s worldview. Which also became so for a reason! Ok, but the main problem is that lack of pleasure is used as the only criterion for understanding that time is wasted. It's literally like an on/off button. There is pleasure - I work. There is no pleasure - I feel a loss of time → self-sabotage, unwillingness to work, etc. This is an example of a limiting belief. A belief that limits the number of reactions in situations X. Either this way or not at all. Black and white thinking. How to enrich the number of possibilities? One of the options is with the help of questions: • For you, if work is not enjoyable, is it absolutely always wasted time? • What other signs of wasted time are there other than lack of enjoyment from work? Just a lack of pleasure - wasted time?• Ok, if you don’t have fun at work, that means you’re wasting time, and what is the reason for displeasure at work? • Always when work gives pleasure - is this (saved?) time? • Is it possible that you work with little pleasure, but you save time (you spend it usefully)? • Is it possible that you work with pleasure, but you still waste time? • How exactly does the process of losing time occur when you work without pleasure?• What could happen that would make you work without much pleasure, but feel that you are spending your time usefully?• Time can only be lost by working without pleasure?• Other people too lose time when I work without pleasure? The problem was that the client had no choice in his reactions. And it’s not about “work,” although it may be. With such a conviction, a person will get a similar result in any job. Somewhere in his mind he understood that pleasure cannot be the only criterion and in general it depends on various factors, but at the level of feelings everything worked automatically. My goal was not to convince people to work without pleasure. The goal was to expand the number of available choices. So that the client can 1) choose what is important to him depending on the situation, 2) realize that pleasure from work is his zone.