Listen, every now and then, it’s good to check in and see whose flying this thing we call work.Don’t feel like reading? Click here for the audio.
This week, it’s back to basics. This blog and the work I’m doing as a life coach has one purpose. I help people who are overworked, tired, unhappy, in a rut or unsure of their next step at work, get more control, feel better, and enjoy work.
The thing about this that makes me
want to stand up and shout is we all have a lot more control than we think. We
have control over what we pay attention to. We have control over our reasons
for being at work. We have control over what meaning we attribute to the work
we do, why we’re doing it, and how we execute. We have control over our
feelings, our thoughts, our actions.
I think there are a lot of people
out there who believe that their only choice at work is to try to deal with
what other people say and do, to try to make other people happy and pray that
someone changes things so they can be happy.
This, my friends, doesn’t work.
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
There’s no single way for everyone to be happy, but the first step is the same for everyone. Take back all the control that you possibly can. Err on the side of assuming you can act and effect changes right from your cubicle. You take back control the minute that you decide that you want to be happy at work or you want to stop overworking, or you want to do more of the work you’re best at. Whatever it is that you are waiting for so that you can feel better at work, take control of that.
Here’s the crazy thing. The only reason I’ve gone back to basics on this blog is that my brother asserted control. I want to turn this blog into a podcast. A bit of music for the podcast would be cool, after all, this is Rock Your Day Job. So I turned to my brother.
My brother is some kind of associate director of client learning programs but his side hustle is as a folk-world-rock singer-songwriter. So I thought great, let me get James to write me an intro/ outro. He said cool but… give me an outline of the journey you want to take your listeners on so I can tie the music to the point of all this.
What?
I just wanted him to string some notes together and make magic. Turns out… he’s an Associate Director of Client Learning Programs. Oh. That means he knows how to design systems that teach people stuff. He thinks I should have a plan and not waste your time. Huh.
So I sat down and started to chart out the outline for the next year and I realized this blog had gotten off course. I decided to get back to basics, the real reason I’m here. I help people who are exhausted and unhappy at work get more control, feel better and enjoy work.
This week, try to notice where you feel out of control at work. Then ask yourself what you can and can’t truly control. For instance, you can’t control what other people do or how they think, but you can control what actions you will take and you can control how you want to think about situations. You can’t control if your boss likes you, but you can control how you think about your boss. You can’t control which projects you’ll get, but you can control how you behave when opportunities arise and who you discuss your preferences with.
My brother influenced my entire process just by stating that he wanted to work from an outline.
Control. He exerted a lot of influence right there but he also exercised control over himself. He didn’t need me to change, he didn’t say no to writing music for me. He just understood how he wanted to work, what he needed from others, and he allowed himself to ask for it.
Your dream wasn’t canceled, but if you’re not seeing it… maybe you forgot to renew. This week’s blog is part 5 of the 5-part series on permanent change
For the audio version of this blog, scroll to the end and press play.
I’d done it all.I’d worked through the lifestyle implications of the changes I want to make happen. I cleared out space for my new work. I believed it could be done, kinda. I was planning and doing, heading towards change when all of a sudden, it wasn’t in my frame of reference. I couldn’t see it and then I tripped.
This week, I was seriously trucking along. I was committing tasks to my calendar and executing them. I’d hit a major milestone on my side hustle and delivered results. At my day job, I was making progress on several fronts and I was keeping my health goals in line…I even got up early and went out for a run… in the dark… and yet…Boom!
A total eclipse of my plans.
A trainee showed up that I forgot was arriving. He smiled at me and I thought “Oh no! What am I going to give him to do?” I had to cancel a launch at my day job to allow for more testing and fixes. I fell behind on daily tasks for one of my side ventures. Then, I tossed all my health goals to the wind, plopped some cheese and crackers on a plate and went out to my porch, in 24-degree weather, to brood.
Stuff happened.
Stuff is always going to happen; it doesn’t mean we should go out on the porch and brood. If we do, it certainly doesn’t mean we should stay there. Especially if it’s dark and cold out.
The business of change is the business of renewal. Daily, weekly, any time.
Here’s the deal. All or nothing thinking is the enemy. At work, believing we know it all is the first step toward failure. When we think things are black and white, cut and dry, done and over, we lose. We don’t listen to other people’s ideas, we don’t try to think of improvements, we don’t run hard right up to the deadline. We give up, think small and don’t listen.
The same is true when we’re trying to change. If you indulge in all or nothing perspectives, you’re taking the easy way to failure.
Telling myself if I don’t do everything I planned, my plan is a failure, is ridiculous right?I’m being too hard on myself.
Or am I? I might be going easy.
It’s easy because I don’t have to sit down and evaluate where things went south and revise my plan. It’s easy because I don’t have to pick myself up and try again. It’s easy because I can just stop.
Too bad that’s not how we frame this type of quitting to ourselves. We don’t call ourselves out for this kind of cheating. Instead, we wallow a bit. I know I do. I feel like a failure, I ruminate on it, but I also give up. It feels bad, but it also feels like a bit of a relief.
The business of change is the business of renewal. Daily, weekly, any time, all the time.
So how are you doing on your goals? Did you set any for this year?
If you did, were you gung-ho for a bit?
How are you feeling now?
Or are you so gun-shy that you no longer set goals?
Here’s what I know:
You can always start over, every day and twice on Sundays.
If you shoot for the stars and hit Everest, heck, you hit Everest. Dude.
There’s more than one way to anywhere.
The business of change is the business of renewal – and revision.
Renew your commitment.
Revise your plan.
Do yourself the favor of seeing reframing and re-trying as the most compassionate things you can do for yourself. Because they are. There is no reason you have to take the best route to your dreams. Take any route, take all the routes. It’s a dream. It’s your inheritance as a human. A dream is a privilege.
The business of change is the business of renewal.
Whatever your dream is, whatever you want to achieve, don’t cancel it. Spend time with it. You were designed to go after it. It’s in your DNA.
If you would like to take the first step to permanent change, click here.
The business of change is the business of joy.
And that? Is something worth chasing.
Click play for the audio version of Don’t Trip on the Rug
How well do you treat yourself when it comes to trust? The answer to that question is a big indicator of how well you’ll do with your commitment to change.
Welcome to week four of my series on permanent change. In week one, we looked at the difference between achievement and life-style change. We completed a worksheet designed to help you get clear on what you’ll need to do to fit change into your life. If you didn’t get that, please go back to “How to Plan a Coup” and go ahead and get your copy of the worksheet from the link there.
In week two, we talked about making room in your life so that you actually can complete a change, or achieve a goal. Last week, we worked on how to believe that change is possible and if you did the work there, you saw how your belief fluctuates day-to-day and you learned how to increase your belief. This week, in honor of national Give Up Your Resolution Day, we’ll take a deep dive into how to trust yourself to actually do the thing you set out to do.
This year, you’re going to stage a coup. Even if you haven’t committed to anything yet, even if you’ve already started and given up. That’s right. No matter how you approach it, you’re going to change this year – whether you plan to or not.
The key to actually achieving your goal is to plan it and then execute the plan. Sounds simple but it’s wicked hard. Here are three planning tricks I bet you’ve never tried.
1: Plan To Delight Your (immediate) Future Self
I’ve blogged a lot about planning but here’s something I bet you don’t think of when you plan – your future self. No, I don’t mean the future you who has the new job, learned the cool coding language or got a great project. I mean the person you’ll be tomorrow when you have to take the first step.
I played a game with myself this week. I wrote down in detail each thing I was going to eat one day ahead of time. Then, I tried to follow my plan. I had said I’d make cereal with skim milk. We had none, and my car was in the shop. I skipped the meal, waiting for my husband to come home. I didn’t have spinach, I went to the store and got it. On it went. It was really hard. Then, I found myself at 5 pm with nothing planned for the time of day I like to sit outside and have a toddy or coffee and read. Bummer. I caved. I had 2 toddies, and from there on, it was a free for all.
I didn’t plan with any consideration for myself. I didn’t think about how much I like my happy hour, I didn’t think about what it would be like if anything went wrong. Folks, that was the opposite of self-care.
I did the experiment again, designing my food plan to delight my future self. I had a plan for coffee and a vita-muffin at 5 pm, I made sure I had everything I needed and I planned food that I would love. I treated my future self like gold. How did I do? Easy Peasy. I stuck to it like glue.
So when you plan what you’re going to do, plan to delight yourself, plan to hit your goal in a way that is all about making the you of tomorrow feel well treated.
2: Plan to Build Trust
Look, trusting that you will do what you say you’ll do is the cat’s pajamas. We work hard to make sure other people believe that we’ll come through at work. Our reputations matter a lot. Why? Because if we don’t live up to our commitments, then we won’t be trusted with the good projects, we won’t get opportunities and we’ll wind up doing the same thing day after day. We want the good work, the meaningful work, the great stuff. We get it by living up to expectations and delivering on commitments.
Dude, it’s the same deal with you & yourself.
If we don’t live up to our commitments to ourselves, we won’t trust ourselves. We’ll hesitate to take on new challenges because we’ve burned our bridge with ourselves. We won’t believe us when we say that we’re going to get a raise, or we’re going to hit our goals, or we’re going to get a better job.
How would it feel to know, one hundred percent, that if you committed to something just for your self, that you would for sure come through?
That feeling? Is insanely good. How do you get it? By planning carefully. Set yourself up to win. I was always very careful not to promise my son anything that I wasn’t going to deliver. When times got tough, I was able to ask him if he believed that I would do what I said. Even though our relationship was strained at that moment, he had to say yes. He trusted that I would do what I said. I felt ten feet tall and at the same time, I felt very grounded. Why? Because I believed it too.
Plan carefully, and remind yourself during execution that you’re building trust with yourself. With that kind of relationship with yourself, you can soar. You can build an amazing life starting right where you’re at.
3: Retrain Your Brain
This is all about execution. This is the DO part of plan / do.
During the execution of any plan, you’ll feel a pull to waffle a bit, to stop and check email, to read one news story, to find a better playlist, to do a bit of “research” on the internet. These things come up as urges. Sudden impulses to quit on yourself and distract yourself.
Humans are hardwired to seek pleasure, immediately, and avoid pain – permanently. The problem is, the pain we experience most of the time is emotional pain brought on by circumstances that our ancestors even a hundred years ago never dreamed of.
That emotional pain is caused by our thoughts.
“I’m a fraud.” “This project is taking longer than I thought and I won’t finish in time.” “I don’t have everything I need and I’ve waited too long.” “I have to make this report perfect or people will think something bad about me.”
The list never ends. No, listen, the list seriously never ends. That’s why it’s key to learn how to allow an urge without answering it. When you feel that pull to check emails, don’t resist it. And don’t give in either. If you resist it, you’ll go home exhausted. Will power is not a good plan long term. And if you give in, the darn thing will become stronger next time.
You have to retrain your brain. You do this by allowing. You notice the urge to check emails. You acknowledge it. ( I try to name the feeling that preceded the urge, such as frustration, or anxiety.) Then you hang out with it for a few seconds. Play with it. Here’s how it looks:
I feel anxious and I want to go find a new playlist to listen to while I work. I think – this is an urge. Why do I want to stop working and answer this urge? Because I feel frustrated. What’s that like? I feel tight in the shoulders. I feel tension in my jaw. Let me hang with this. Can I get more frustrated? Let’s see how I can build it up. That’s interesting. Can I make it less? Make it more again? Am I still OK? Yes? OK, good. That’s an urge. I want to avoid frustration by answering the urge but that will just make things worse. I’m going to go back to work.
That’s the art of allowing an urge to be there and not answering it. The next time I feel frustrated, the strength of the urge to distract myself will be less. If I do that enough, the urges will die down and my confidence will go way up.
To build a great working relationship with yourself – plan to delight yourself, plan to build trust and then make your relationship with yourself a priority, and retrain your brain by decommissioning urges. If you can do these three things, you can stage a coup for the ages.
The way you think about your goals changes the outcome. Do you believe that?
Like short blogs? This is the one for you. It’s really late and I’m busting this out because I’m committed to getting this out to you all each and every Monday.
Two weeks ago, the blog focused on the difference between viewing your goal as a one-time achievement or a lifestyle change. Click Here for your free worksheet.
Last week, I talked about clearing out room in your life to accomplish your new goal. The most critical place to create space in your life is in your mind.
The next step to permanent change is the way you talk to yourself about that change.
When I’m on track for achieving something, my thoughts go something like this – I’m excited. I wonder how much closer I’ll get today? This is going to be great. How can I do this? What should I do next?
I know I’m not going to get very far when I think like this: I’m struggling. I’m falling behind. I hope I can do this. I’m not very good at this. I haven’t done well, I need to do better. I’ll do better tomorrow.
You might not think that how you manage your mind is the major factor in achieving change, but I beg to differ. Look at the thoughts in the first example. See how many of them are open-questions? The person thinking that way is already on their way to finding more opportunities for success.
So how to do you come around to that way of thinking?
Each day – fill one side of a notebook page with positive thoughts about your goal.
Then restate your goal.
Then ask yourself how you feel about your goal.
If you feel positive, ask yourself what action you should take.
If you feel negative, ask yourself what other thoughts you could have and what action you can take to overcome that negative feeling.
Write all this down on paper, keep the pages together. Do this for 30 days.
Review the pages and think about what you learned.
Here’s what I learned when I did this. First off, it feels great to give yourself a daily cheering on for a full page. Second, half the time I would repeat my goal statement and feel negative or doubtful and half of the time I would feel positive. I could always think of something I could do to help me with my goal.
After a while, I realized that my feelings about my goal weren’t actually accurate. At any given time I might be upbeat or pessimistic, yet there were always other ways to look at it and action I could take. The way I felt stopped being such a big deal. I started to choose to feel positive. The more days I took action, the more success I had, the more enthusiastic I became and the more success I had.
It’s a giant flywheel for change – belief, action, results, belief, action, results.
So step three for permanent change is to start to take active steps to manage your belief.
If you want help learning how – I’d love to walk you through it. Try a 25-minute session free – sign up here.
