Month: October 2019

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Off Track? Welcome to Life.

It’s not all newly paved highway and light traffic.
If you’re pursuing change, you’ll need four-wheel drive.

So I’m typing this blog up on the exact day it will first appear.  I deliver my blog on Mondays at 6 am – and I’m starting this off at 5:13 am.   Worse yet, my web hosting platform just locked me out.   I still intend to make my deadline.

Did I forget that I needed to get a blog and newsletter out to you guys? No.  I purposely made a decision to show you one of the core concepts of my Reboot Your Day Job process – refusing to overwork.

This past week, I’ve been running promotions on social media to get a copy of my “Work Less Starting Tomorrow”  PDF and companion video – both free.  Ironically, one of my favorite social media sites picked up a story about a German company that is trying to move to a five-hour workday – which blew my mind a little because most of my clients come to me praying for an eight-hour day. So I was thinking about how to show the people that I most want to help – the people stuck in overwork hell – how to get free of it.

OK, so hold those thoughts.   The final leg to the stool is that I’m personally applying my own process to an overworking problem in my life. 

Here’s the story:  I was overworking at my day job.  I didn’t think it was a big deal, because frankly, I worked seventy hours a week for the first fifteen years of my working life.  I went from working three jobs to keep and staying just above the poverty level, to owning a brick and mortar business, which was open seven days a week, to working for a mid-sized company.   Working for a corporation, I started hourly as a file clerk, moved to the help desk and was thrilled to be able to get overtime for the first time in my life.  Working fifty hours a week was a walk in the park.   As I moved up, working seven days a week was no skin off my back.  It was reasonable – to me.  On-call 24/7 system support? No sweat.  In my house, my husband, myself, and our son – all of us had jobs that included unexpected changes to our plans, even if that plan was sleep.

Becoming a workaholic was kinda like hopping into cool water and staying in as the heat rose. I didn’t really notice it.

In 2017 when I embarked on a journey to reclaim my life and figure out what was causing this feeling of not quite rightness.    I was happy – kinda.  But I felt low-grade anxiety most of the time.  I was always worried about something at the office.  I fretted over my mistakes, and I thought about work All – The – Time.   Something was wrong but what?

I quit all activities except for my volunteer gig and my day job.  I went on a diet, and I hired a life coach.

But the biggest thing that changed for me was I stopped overworking. I accidentally stumbled over a process that helped me get better at work, at my life, have less anxiety, and see all the ways my working style had been holding me back.   True dat.  All those extra hours had been really sub-optimal for my performance. 

My blogs from this whole year and my website are a product of me explaining what I’ve learned. 

In short order, my work week had been stuffed back into a nicely sized bag of reasonable.  I still put in more than the 40 hours a week that’s mandated but not much, and I do it because that’s the size work week that suits me. 

But here’s what happened next – I opened a business since I had a bunch of free time.  Then I opened another one and then?  I was back in the boiling pot of overworking again.  The difference?  This time, I’d been out of the hot water for a while, so I noticed it right away.  I didn’t like it.  I wasn’t willing to swim in that stew anymore.   So, I’m applying my stop overworking process now to my new business. This means when my granddaughter showed up on Saturday, and my blog wasn’t done, I played with her.  When Sunday dawned and my new rule – no work on Sunday was in play – I had to decide. Would I cave in and work or would I practice what I preach?   I took Sunday off.

I knew also that I couldn’t just get up extra early on Monday morning to kill myself with overwork at three am to make up for taking Sunday off.  I got up at five am this morning – as always.  Because the key to stopping the overwork habit is to let yourself get into a box like this and figure out how to get out of it.  

It was really uncomfortable on Sunday.   The thought of this blog followed me all day.  Last night, I woke up several times, worrying about it.   I held firm though and for the first time in months, I’m going to work on Monday with a clean house and some homemade soup for lunch – because that’s what I used my day off for.  Phone calls to both my parents were made while I cleaned.  I also bathed my dogs, got their nails filed back to short, cleaned their teeth and ears.    I organized my CD’s.  Yeah, I’m having a good time remembering what it was like to listen to one artist for an hour.  (It’s great.)  I did my laundry.  I dressed my older dog in a pumpkin costume and she and I went to the local hospital and did a couple of hours of therapy work there.  I listened to a divine book on tape. 

I lived my life.

If you would like a free 25-minute session – click here. It’s free, it’s on zoom, camera on or camera off. It’s my pleasure

Then I got up on time and blew out this blog – a real-life, real-time example – of how to get back on the road when life bumps you off it.  

When I tell you that the key to stopping overwork is to stop overworking and then figure out how to deal with the fallout, I’m not kidding.    If you try to catch up first and then stop overworking it – will- not – work.   You will never catch up.

But you absolutely can figure out how to get more done in less time – when you give yourself less time.

And that’s just good to know. 

Happy Monday Folks!  Work hard, work smart, and work less.

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Showing Up as Your Authentic Self

If being yourself at work feels like you’re one step closer to a pink slip, read on.

Who’s your best friend? Go ahead, answer that question. I’ll wait. And yes, you can have more than one. Ok, got your answer? Did you say your spouse? A childhood friend? I’ll tell you what you probably didn’t say – you didn’t say – me.

Don’t be a wise guy. I mean you, not me. Hopefully, I’m your life coach – which is a totally different thing. Basically, I’m asking if you are your own best friend. Anyone who said yes? High five, Dude.

If you want to shut down anxiety and start feeling better at work… Dudette, call me. Let’s talk about how coaching can get you mad skillz so you can show up relaxed and confident at work. Click here. We got this.

Here’s the deal. At some point, we all do something at work that is authentically ourselves. We speak out at a meeting. We vote “no confidence” during sprint planning. We buy clown shoes as a gag. We go a little Jerry McGuire, and then? We feel embarrassed. We fret over what we said, we change our vote, we go home at lunch and get our loafers. We shred our manifesto.

This is a deep-rooted survival pattern – the need for acceptance kept us aligned with the tribe. In turn, the tribe kept us safe.

When we do this at work, we train ourselves to be quiet in meetings, vote differently than we believe, stop sharing our love of slapstick and trade in our passion for cynicism. That’s painful for us and bad news for the companies we work for.

Nothing drives innovation like unique interests and points of view colliding with a problem.

Whoa. What’s all this got to do with being your own best friend?

Ready?

To show up as yourself, you need to be comfortable with who you are. Your best friend knows that you wore your shirt inside out to work last week. They like you anyway. You never get that line from Seinfeld right, but your BFF laughs anyway. They know what you mean. Your intentions are clear even when you act like an idiot. They wait for you when you’re late and pay the bill when you forget your purse. You’re not perfect and your BFF doesn’t give a fig. And that? Lets you stop worrying about fitting in and start being you.

To be your own best friend requires courage. You have to accept that you’re human, you’ll fail and you’ll win and you have to like yourself either way. You have to treat yourself with compassion.

If you are your own best friend, when you’re the only one at the planning meeting holding up a confidence level of one, you don’t change your vote. Instead, you explain to the group why you think that. You wear your damn clown shoes until someone laughs and you make their day. More importantly, you continue to speak up in meetings even if you were flat-out foolish in the last one.

I’m not saying don’t learn from mistakes. Dude, that’s just silly. I’m saying don’t let mistakes make you their errand boy. I’m not advocating for being disruptive and throwing manners out the window, either. You, waiting your turn, aiming for brevity and being polite is still you. There’s plenty of room within civility for speaking your truth.

Accepting what is unique about yourself, appreciating your great points and not shutting yourself down is being authentic.

If you punish yourself every time you get outside the tribal norm, you will never want to bring yourself to work.

To stop punishing yourself, act like your own best friend.

Every company on the planet has to innovate faster and more effectively every day. Every person on the planet has a unique voice. Every problem on the planet has a solution.

Show up as yourself and get to work. The world needs us all.

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Master the Art of Self Compassion

Does your inner critic treat you like this?
She can.

Here’s the thing, we all want to be happy, have peace, eat well and see the Mets make it to the world series. What? You don’t agree? Because you don’t want peace? Oh, the Mets…well some of you are still with me.

While we want to have these things, we do just about everything in our power to get away from the one thing that will get us closer to happiness and peace. We overeat, binge-watch TV and fiddle away the day on social media to avoid just being with ourselves. Because hey, sometimes we can be our own worst critic.

Hey, I get it. One weekend I decided to change the sheets and clean the bedroom without music, TV, audible or even a dog to talk to. I didn’t have my phone with me. It was just me and the dust bunnies and I’ll tell you, things got ugly REAL quick.

No, I wasn’t sucked under the bed by the monster – he’s where he’s always been -in my head. First I became aware of a running loop of thoughts. My head was full of worried, fretful, self reproachful little thoughts running around in there. No wonder I prefer to clean listening to books on tape. Who wouldn’t? And that’s exactly where we foul it up.

By escaping from the thoughts we have playing on a loop in our brains, we lose the opportunity to bring them out and acknowledge them.

Not that day though. I was very aware of each thought and after about the fifth or sixth one, I got creative. I got a notebook out and laid it on the dresser. Then I waited to spring my trap. The next random thought that my brain offered me, I jotted down. Then I said, OK. That’s one. Next? I turned the page and went back to work. Soon, a new nasty bit of self-criticism popped up. I walked over and wrote it on the new page and turned that page. This went on for quite a bit. It made making the bed take longer, that’s for sure, but eventually, when I asked for the next thought, my brain was beautifully silent.

The first step to loving yourself is stepping back and finding empathy, for yourself.

I still have that notebook sitting right here on my desk. I pulled it out to see what my real thoughts were that day. Here they are:

  • People disapprove.
  • I’m a worried person
  • I’m going to be in trouble
  • I’m being shoved aside
  • My self-absorption is disgusting
  • I’m not a good wife
  • I feel bad for my husband marrying a waste like me

It’s not easy for me to share these on this website. But the truth is, I don’t even remember the situation that set this thinking off. I’m sharing my private and painful thoughts because I know that I’m not the only person who has a brain that does this type of thing. I’m sharing them on the off chance that someone out there will try this technique because writing these thoughts down on paper changed everything for me. Here’s what I learned:

  1. Writing this type of thought down gets it out of your head. The method was very important though. If you just sit down with a diary and write and write, your mind will build out logic and evidence for why these thoughts are true. You can wind up feeling even worse. But not engaging with the thought, just writing it down, turning the page and asking – OK, next? – objectifies it. Each time I wrote a thought and turned the page, my brain left that thought behind.
  2. Eventually, your brain runs out of canned thoughts. I kept writing and turning the page and finally, finally, my mind was quiet, calm, relieved. It was like it had a finite set of blather in there and was too lazy to go get anything new to bug me with. Blessed relief.
  3. Looking at what you are carrying in your mind can be the doorway to true self-compassion. When both my mind and my room was clean, I sat on the bed and turned the pages of the notebook, looking at each sentence dispassionately. None of these thoughts were true. They’re an example of what one of my clients calls snowballing -packing more and more negative around a small starting point. I thought about the woman who was having these thoughts. I felt such compassion for that person. No person should have to carry those thoughts around. It was obvious that the thoughts were overblown, and just as evident that she must have been suffering as she thought them. I had been suffering and it was completely unnecessary.
Turning your critic into your ally changes everything.

That day was literally the first time in my life that I felt compassion for myself. I wasn’t judging myself. I wasn’t full of self-pity. I wasn’t avoiding my thoughts and feelings but I also wasn’t rolling around in them. I could see the thoughts I’d been thinking and I could see that they weren’t true. I could empathize with the woman who’d been carrying them around but I also saw the error in her thinking. Until I was able to step back, I hadn’t seen how needless my suffering was. I gave myself a big imaginary hug and then told myself to move on. There were more rooms to clean.

Acknowledging that we are suffering needlessly and feeling empathy for the person who suffers is the first step in turning your inner critic into your inner BFF. After all, she looks like you, she hangs out with you and you’re stuck with each other. You two ought to be friends.

And that? Is just good to know.

If you would like help with your inner critic so you can stop agonizing over every little mistake, I’ve totally got you. Sign up for a free 25 minute mini-session. We meet using Zoom. We’ll see if coaching is something that might be helpful, and then we can see if you’ld like to coach with me or if I can recommend another coach for you. I’m pretty harmless and I love to talk about this stuff. Click here and get hooked up.

NEXT WEEK: how self-compassion is the key to showing up as yourself at work, and why it matters.

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What Does Your Boss Think?

Does guessing what your boss thinks of you feel like bonding with a rock?
Yeah, well, there’s a way out of that.

So here’s my confession. I’ve spent a lot of my work life fairly certain that my boss didn’t like me. Not that I needed my boss to like me, I mean, that’s their loss right? Right?

Don’t get me wrong, I work at a great company and I’ve been blessed with tremendous managers. But you know, org charts change, people move around and reporting structures are often a shifting landscape.

So, many times, I’ve been unsure as to where I stood with regard to my boss. Once, I was completely convinced that my soon-to-be new boss absolutely did not like me. I just knew it in my bones. And that? Was scary.

Being part of the tribe and knowing our standing within the tribe is one of those life or death things. We’ll take serious risks and work very hard to maintain our standing and feel secure in our position and when that position is unclear – my friends, you can find at yourself with a good old fashioned case of anxiety.

Good thing feeling anxious is a really great way to be productive at work. (Not.) Better yet, once we’re anxious, our performance slips and we really do have something to worry about.

If you would like a free 25-minute session – click here. It’s free, it’s on zoom, camera on or camera off. It’s my pleasure

But what if there was another way?

Demoralized and worried, I talked to my coach. She asked me if I thought I could control what my boss’s opinion of me was. I’ve been around the coaching block a time or two so I didn’t take the bait. We can’t control other people. Full stop.

OK, so stop worrying about what you can’t control, she said. And then, she suggested a radical new idea. I should start taking action on what I could control. My new boss might not like me, but I, for sure, could like my boss.

I’m pretty sure I just blinked at her. What did that even mean? I was the underling. How was this a solution?

Trust me, she said. Can you like your boss?

I thought about it. Sure, I could like my boss. I like just about 98% of the people I meet. What would that get me?

Here’s the deal – when we like other people, we get to think nice thoughts about them. When we think cool things like – my boss is well respected, understands a lot about some areas I find interesting, has a great sense of humor, is a decent human being and has a lot to manage, we start to feel – friendly. We start to look forward to meeting with that person, we look for ways to help, we’re open and enthusiastic and we stay positive when we’re around them. Soon, we’re just having a good ol’ time and who cares if they like us or not? How could we tell? We’re just busy having fun.

And guess what? Who doesn’t like to work with a person who behaves like that? See how that works? It’s a no-lose situation.

But if we tie how we’re going to feel to how we imagine someone else feels, we’ve lost all control. Because we have no control over how other people feel and now we’ve attached our own feelings to something we can’t control. NO FUN.

Emotional adulthood is when we decide to assume the mantel of command, and take charge of our own emotional navigation. It’s when we take responsibility for how we feel and let other people worry about themselves. Emotional adulthood is available to all of us, right now.

So that’s what I did. I really did like my new manager, and I was able to focus on all the positive qualities this person had. I stopped worrying about what my manager thought about me. I focused on my work and the fact that I was working for a manager I was determined to like. Guess what? My anxiety went away and to this day, I have a big, expansive feeling inside when our paths cross. Who knows if that manager likes me? I sure as hell like them.

And that? Is just good to know.