Month: March 2019

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Is What You Think – True?

Hey Neo, are you sure you took the red pill?
Sometimes, you don’t have to be stuck in the Matrix to be misinformed.

I’ve got bad news.

Your brain – is lazy – but in a good way. It’s efficient. It conserves its resources and wastes no time on stuff it can automate. It’s like the best I.T. department ever and it’s in your head. All of which ought to be a good thing, but if you don’t understand how it’s running things – your brain can pull a fast one on you. And that’s bad news.

There’s hope.

The good news is that you can figure out the rules to the game and start to get the renegade department back under corporate control – and working for you.

Rule #1 – Separate the Situation from Your Thoughts About It

Here’s the deal. We think that our situations cause us to feel things. But between the situation and our feelings about it, there’s a thought. It’s our thinking about situations that causes us to have feelings. That’s important because our feelings drive our actions , and our actions are what create results. If you’re not aware of the thoughts you’re having, you can’t work with them, alter them or control them. So the first order of business is to get in the habit of separating out Facts from your Thoughts. To do this, start free associating, writing down random sentences that come into your mind. Do this for about two minutes. Now go back and circle the things that are facts. Ask yourself – would everyone agree to this sentence? If the answer is no, that’s a thought. It’s not a fact. Do this every day for a month and you’re going to notice something profound. There are not lot of facts floating around in our minds. We’re mostly tossing around opinions. This is good news because facts are really hard to change, but thoughts? Well, let’s just say we have some control over those.

Rule #2- Don’t Just Take What Your Brain Hands You

It’s disappointing, I know, but your brain isn’t actually spending a lot of time picking just the right thought for you in any given situation. Actually, it’s spending almost no time deciding what to think. David Rock, in his book “Your Brain At Work” did a great job hammering home the point that the ideas in our frontal cortex are a limited mix of whatever we thought most recently and whatever is emotionally charged. Basically, all that mind chatter you’ve got going on? It’s just random. These aren’t great truths about who you are. These are a convenient and easy-to-find mix of thoughts that happen to be quick for your brain to grab onto and toss into your conscious. I remember the day I first really got that. I was so angry to think I’d been treating all that negative and frankly, confusing, stuff like it was important. Those ideas in my brain weren’t important. They were just the things I’d thought most recently.

If you’d like to learn more about how to work with your mental chatter and get it singing in tune with your best self, sign up for a free 25-minute session. https://RockYourDayJob.as.me/free

Rule #3 – Follow Ideas Through to the Results Before You Decide to Believe Them.

If we confuse facts with opinions and attribute our feelings to our situations rather than to our thoughts, then we’re ceding control of our actions to our environment. In no way does that put us in the driver’s seat. If I think my boss is making me upset and hurting my feelings, then there is very little I can do about it. But if I acknowledge that it’s my thoughts about my boss that are making me upset, I suddenly have a lot of control. Ergo, it’s to my advantage to start to prove to myself that those thoughts I’m having are the cause of my feelings. Why? Because then I can get control of my feelings and if I do that? Well, then my actions are suddenly under my control and, because actions are what get me results…my results are in play too. A very good place to be.

We also confuse the random thoughts that pop up in situations with logically selected ideas. When I offer up my new idea in a meeting and everyone laughs, my knee jerk response is going to be to tell myself never, never to speak in a meeting again. But if I recognize that never speaking again is just what my brain handed me when people laughed at me, I can start to figure out if that tactic is going to get me the best result. It might be that even though people laughed, they did hear my idea and I might use that in my favor. But if I never get past “don’t speak in a meeting ever again”, then I won’t have any other, better ideas.

So, with any thoughts about subjects that are important, make sure you’re asking yourself if you are looking at a fact, or a thought. If it’s a thought, ask yourself what result this thought will get you and, if you don’t like that result, ask your brain to get busy finding you some better thoughts you can believe.

Now, who’s calling the shots? Not some guy in the Matrix. Not on your watch.

Next Week: How we know thoughts drive feelings.

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You Gotta Fight…For Your Time.

We all have the same twenty-four hours…
But someone is trying to steal yours.

Everybody Wants You

Look, time is the one thing that you can’t get back after it’s gone. You’re not going to earn more time. You don’t even know how much you’ve got. You can trade some of it for money by going to work and putting in your steady eight plus. You can trade even more of it for money by doing for yourself what you could pay someone else to do, like mowing the lawn or washing the car.

If you’re like most people, you watch TV. You’ll trade a big eighteen-minute chunk of your time to advertisers for the privilege of trading forty-two minutes for entertainment.

You’ll pick up your cell phone and flat out give the thing 20 minutes just scrolling between apps and emails.

Let’s face it. You? Are getting ripped off.

And that’s not all. The way you’re thinking about time at work isn’t helping you any either. We’ve all been conditioned to think in dollars per hour. If you want more dollars, you have to work more hours. But that’s not actually what’s happening at work, is it? Some people at your shop are bringing home more dollars for that hour. Why? Because of what they can deliver during that time.

Believe me, your company is certainly paying attention to the amount of money they are willing to pay for different types of work … delivered within the work day. Your company is paying you cash for results per hour. No mistake about it.

You should be looking at your time the same way. What results would you be willing to give up an hour to get? If you said you’d like to trade an hour of your life for the chance to eat four twinkies and watch one episode of “Badly Dressed Unhappy People” – I wish you well.

On the off chance that you have better things to do with your time, start taking it seriously.

At work, there’s a version of reality shows and smartphone apps too. It’s called interruption. Emails coming in, people stopping by your desk, the idea that you should get another cup of coffee or a maybe go find a bit of chocolate all conspire to keep you from delivering the results per hour that both you and your company want.

For most knowledge workers, we are being paid to do work that requires concentration and focus. If we’re not careful, those interruptions will suck up our work day and leave us working far into the night to catch up. Here’s four ways to take back your time.

1.

Spend the majority of your day doing the work that is most expensive or most skilled. Let’s face it – you want them to hire someone else to do the inexpensive stuff you can’t get done – not the other way around.

Once you get your head around that, it’s a lot easier to say ‘later, baby’ to the quick to get done, but not so challenging work of answering emails or filling out forms.

2.

Plan results – not time. That’s right. Don’t decide to spend three hours on coding. Decide what blocks of code you want to finish, then figure out how much time you have to do it. Push hard and settle for B- work until you get that amount of work done in the expected time. You can always come back and polish later during unit testing.

If you’re a manager, plan to get a specific task completed in a fixed time. Once you start planning results, you’ll be amazed at how it will bleed into the way you think about meetings and your personal time.

When you’re working toward a result instead of just burning time, it’s a lot easier to say no to interruptions. Combine that with the dopamine hit you get when you complete the result and you’ve got a big win.

3.

Refuse to work at the expense of yourself. Once I got serious about my time, and the way I want to spend it, I stopped tolerating my tendency to sit for hours at night doggedly trying to catch up. The more I insisted on treating myself decently, the more work I got done during the work day. I’m no where near perfect at this and I still have plenty of days when I get distracted and fail to deliver on my highest priority for the day, but I’m improving every day and it feels – GREAT.

4.

Stop using work to escape your life. You heard me. Work-a-holism is no joke. Our culture loves to applaud the guy that sleeps under his desk. Your mother will forgive you for missing her birthday if you “have to work”. You don’t have to come home, you can get away with just about anything if you’re working. After all, this is American and we love us some crazy hard workers.

It takes one to know one, and for sure, I used heroic work effort to avoid a lot of stuff in my life. And now? I can’t get that time back.

If you would like to have help figuring out how to conquer chaos and get yourself hitting your goals, sign up for a free 25-minute session with me. I would love to take this work further. Click the link below to get started.

Schedule Appointment

Next week – Facts v Opinions – The Ultimate Power Source.

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Three Secrets About Work – Secret #3

Face it. Getting all caught up isn’t really the point.

If Friday leaves you feeling like you have an anvil hanging over your head and Sunday evening feels as if you’re standing under the shadow of a grand piano – like some kind of cartoon sad-sack – you might want to try thinking about work a little differently.

Secret #3

Your Company Isn’t Paying You For Inbox Zero

If you’re like most of us, you spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how to get it all done. I blame primary education for that because, heck, what’s easier than that?   Seriously though, we are taught in school, and at home, that completing everything assigned, or eating everything on our plate is the key to being done. Right?

You know you’ve finished your work for the day, the semester, or the year when everything is complete.  There’s nothing wrong with that – except when you get into the working world, there’s no clear definition of done and the tasks before you change every hour.   If you have an instant messaging system at work, the news is even worse…the list is changing every second. All of that can leave us feeling dejected, stressed, overwhelmed, or worse yet, like failures.

You are never going to be caught up  – and it’s OK.

Let’s face it.  The goal in life and at work isn’t to be caught up.  We all have different goals in life overall, but for sure, your goal isn’t to just stop doing stuff. Your goal in life and at work probably looks a lot like engagement. At home, that means staying present with your people, being curious and doing the things that have great meaning for you.

If you don’t know what your priorities are, I feel you. I have a fabulous exercise that can clear that up for you in an eye-opening way. Schedule a free 25-minute session and I’ll take you through it. It would be my honor. https://rockyourdayjob.as.me/FREE

At work, engagement looks a lot like bringing your best self to the job and tearing into the stuff that will have a significant impact on your company, your team, your boss and yourself.   And before you fight me on that, really think about where that stack lines up.

You want your team and company to succeed – of course, you do. So does your boss. What nobody wants is for any of us to spend all day distracted from the most important work and delivering on the urgent but not important.

What does that look like? One word answer, baby.

RESULTS

So start asking yourself what is that thing, that if you don’t do it, nothing else you do will matter? Check your answer. If you answered every email, but you didn’t do that one thing, would anybody care that you answered all those emails?

On our team, we denote that on our priority list with a row of stars -like this:

  • The Big Thing
  • ****************************
  • Everything else

That way, we all know that anything below that line is in play. Anything above it is the top priority. It doesn’t mean we slack off, don’t respond to emails and generally muck around. Of course not. We take pride in our work and so do you. What it means is, we don’t beat ourselves up for not hitting everything all the time.

When you start to judge your own performance on the results you’re delivering and not your ability to swat at a barrage of incoming information – you start to own your time.

When you own your time – The Results… Are Magic.

Next Week: Fight for Your Time

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Three Secrets About Work – Secret #2

Get real about why you’re working. It’s not because your Aunt Mary is making you.

If you’re dragging your sorry self to work, feeling like you’re heading off to another day on the chain gang, you might want to try these perspective-switching ideas on for size. 

Secret #2

The Reason You’re Working… Is Not What You Think

Let’s face it. You have to work – right? You have bills to pay, kids to raise, a future to provide for… you just don’t have a choice.

Maybe so… and Maybe NOT.

If you are telling yourself that you have to work, ask yourself if that’s the best way to think about it. If you’re like most of us, that idea acts like a stick on the rump of a donkey.  It drives us out of bed, we reluctantly plod to our car and force ourselves to get to work.

I hear you. You’ve got that snarky voice in your head sayin’ ‘Yeah? Should I start a gratitude journal or what?’ Don’t think I didn’t catch the sarcasm there.

It would be better to think that we are blessed to have a job.  If work was like a carrot and we raced forward to our desks, excited to be there, that would be great.  The problem is we don’t believe it. Yeah, we’re grateful but kinda not.  Our brains tell us we’re lucky to have our careers, but we’re still dragging ourselves out of bed and prayin’ for relief.

Knock it off. 

You don’t HAVE to work.  You can just stop.  Any day.

Sure, if you stop working, you won’t have a paycheck.  But you don’t have to get a paycheck.  There’s a lot of people out there that don’t have one.  

“Yeah,” you say, “but they’re living in a tent.”

And so could you.

“I don’t wanna live in a tent,” you say. “I want to live in my house.”

Oh. You want to live in your house. And working is how you accomplish that? Then you want to work.

Get it? There are thousands of people who don’t pay their bills.  You’re not one of them. There are thousands of people who don’t send their kids to college and who don’t save for retirement.  You’re not one of them.  You are choosing to work.

And when you believe that you’re doing all this because you choose to?

Seriously. That changes everything.

Next week – Secret #3 : Your Company Isn’t Paying You for Inbox Zero

Want to Learn More? – Click here. https://RockYourDayJob.as.me/FREE