Don’t you wish for work to feel like this? Relaxed, clean, a cup of coffee and a blank page? Fuh-gedda-bout it.
I am a little upset. Mylife isn’t neat and orderly. Stuff is happening and I’m not as caught up as I’d like to be. Sound familiar? You too? Huh.
Well, let me go you one better. My work life is that way too. What do you think of that?
You think I should take down my Life Coach sign and go home, don’t you? Or maybe you’re like many of my clients and you’re a bit relieved to learn that I’ll be spending an hour or four on Sunday getting my inbox in order.
The nature of work is to be messy. Hey, after all, we’re working in here, we’re having a life. Each of us is trying to grow, to master the next thing required of us and to find a way to balance this against all the other demands on our time.
Work is not static and it never will be.
As soon as we wrangle all the demands into an orderly state, as soon as we master what’s in front of us, something changes. A competitor comes up with a better product and we have to catch up. Our co-worker retires and we have to learn their tasks. A new opportunity presents itself and we have to learn to fit it into the puzzle of time and tasks. All of this happens and more. It never ends.
Regardless of where we are on the learning curve, the curve keeps sloping off into the distance.
Are you disappointed?
I used to be so change resistant that I let my living room sofa make me unhappy for a month. I spent hours and hours shopping for it. It was perfect until it arrived. Then it was all wrong – because it wasn’t the couch that used be there.
Now, I’m older. I know I’ve got at least three more couches coming my way before I kick the bucket. I don’t need my couch to be perfect to be happy. It’s not the centerpiece of my life.
What if you let work, be work? You know, kinda how when the cat leaves dead mice on the doormat, you have to acknowledge that Mr. Fuzzy is a predator and not a really short person?
What if you looked at work and noticed that it always comes with challenges? What if you looked at work and noticed that interruptions arise daily? That if you turn off your phone and log out of instant messager, people will show up at your door? That your work consists of both projects and changes to the projects?
If you wish work would be orderly so that you can relax, then you’re wishing for the wrong thing. If you require your situation, or your sofa, to conform to your expectations in order for you to be content, then change is going to be a problem.
When you and your work are separate, you get to be you.
Work gets to be work.
Work can stay messy. And you? You can put your feet up and be content.
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Finding out what you want in life? Priceless. If you’re in my Reboot Your Day Job Program and you haven’t reached week four yet, skip this blog.
What if I asked you to tell me 25 things you want to have in your life – in the future? Do you think it would be hard to come up with that list? My clients did. In fact, most of them were relieved when I let them stop at 20. Want to know what was on their lists?
First, a bit of back story. I’ve been busting my butt to create a new program – Reboot Your Day Job. It’s six weeks long, and it’s jam-packed with all the bells and whistles. I’ve been taking beta-clients through the program for a couple of months now. The difference with a program is that there’s more structure to the work than the normal one on one coaching. As an unintended side-effect, I’ve had a bunch of clients go through the same exercises and I’ve been able to get some interesting data.
If you would like to go through my new program, you can drop me an email at Amy@RockYourDayJob.com and get on my waitlist. You can also sign up for a free 25-minute session – Here.
In week four,most people are starting to feel better, have more free time and less stress, so it’s a good time to talk about the future life they want to build. I ask clients to list out twenty-five things they want to have in their lives. I’m always cheerfully amazed at how difficult this exercise is for them. I’m also quite impressed with how much of what we want out of life is similar across industries, age, and gender.
Here are the common elements most of us want, in no special order:
Health
Happiness
To do something outside – walk, run, sail, swim, bike, garden
Read more
Spend more time, be connected with, family and friends
Reach life stage milestones – a home, college for kids, retirement
Mental health – have peace, clarity, be guilt free
Have a dog or cat
Go somewhere interesting – travel far or near
Do something interesting – start a side hustle or have a hobby
Engage our spiritual practice – meditate, attend church, etc
Notice anything interesting about this list?
People! You don’t have to wait to do this stuff. You can take action right now to be healthier. You can start building out your personal finance plan to hit goals, right now. You don’t need to be five years older and richer before you can go for a run. All you need in order to spend some time reading for pleasure is a library card and a comfortable chair. Dogs, cats, people find ways to have pets all along the income gradient. Day trips, hobbies, startups… the barriers to entry to these are all low. You can attend church this week or sit right down and meditate.
So why are these on our “someday” lists?
Because we’re not building them in now.
And why is that?
A scarcity mindset about time. Most of us say we don’t have time but what we mean is, sometimes we’re busy. Sometimes we have to cancel things. And when we could be doing something on that list above, we’ve forgotten what the list was. But I want to offer you the idea that telling yourself you don’t have time… isn’t helping. Try this – tell yourself you have plenty of time for everything that makes life worth living and no time for the rest. Now, what do you want to do?
All you have to do to start living your dream is … start.
This week I just have to say something about exhaustion. Here it is: Have Mercy…on yourself.The whole blog, read to you.
Needless suffering. This is one of the things that makes me show up, week after week, blogging, coaching and reaching out. There are other things I could be doing with my time and frankly, after a long work week, I often ask myself if this coaching stuff is really worth it, and then, something like this will happen:
Me: “OK, and how do you behave, right then, in the moment?”
Client: “I fall apart.”
Me: “What does that mean? Specifically.”
Next, I hear something like this – they go somewhere safe – home, out for a walk, or just shut the door to their office – and they stop holding back their emotions. I’m not talking about cursing a little bit or needing a tissue. I’m talking about big, sloppy tears or explosive physical releases – emotional exhaustion, physical exhaustion or both. Sometimes, they have to leave for the day. They have to cancel meetings, or they keep it together until they get home and then they lose it on their own time. Most often, they continue to work – literally crying or silently fuming while they continue to answer emails, write code, finish that report.
My heart breaks for my clients who go through this, not because I think they have been victimized at work. I’m heartbroken because the suffering is real, it’s chronic and it is needless.
I work with entrepreneurs, IT professionals, engineers, managers, healthcare professionals, and analysts. These are not people easily overwhelmed by life and the pressures of a career. My clients are uniformly smart, high performing, insightful people with a lot of drive. They are the people companies want most – and they are exhausted.
Look, nobody in corporate America is specifically trying to create workplace conditions that foster overwork, inefficiency, employee frustration, and exhaustion. I have never met a single person in authority who thinks it’s a good idea to foster a culture where people are afraid to go home, tied to ineffective teams and management and literally crying at their desks. Absolutely not. Most executives want staff to focus at work, be willing to deliver during project deadlines and figure out how to go home at a reasonable time.
Where is the disconnect?
Here’s my story:
I used to manage a convenience store for a major chain. I worked more hours than I can even speak to. I worked physically and mentally. I was working so much that I literally couldn’t keep weight on my body; I had to borrow clothes from a friend. My husband took a job in my store, just so he could relieve me. One evening, my father called me to say hi. My speech was redundant and non-sensical. All I could say is “I have to feed my son.” I repeated this over and over. My father, worried but out of state, sent my mother to my home. I remember saying to her, “I have to put him to bed. I need to get him ready for bed.” I remember not being able to stop. She had to take me by the hand and physically guide me to bed. The next day, the doctor ordered me out of work for a full week.
Here’s the thing. I worked myself literally to exhaustion. I was convinced everything I was doing was absolutely critical, vital to my success at work and the functioning of the business. And then, I was yanked out of the store for a full week. And you know what happened to the store?
Nothing.
Someone was sent to cover for me. Everything went on.
I was, in a way, irrelevant.
It was a humbling experience. It also made me vow to never work myself that hard again. All that suffering, all that work, had been for nothing. At some point, I had failed to notice the point of diminishing returns and just kept working. Now, so many years later, I can look back and see the cruelest part of all that – in that state of mind, with so few physical and emotional resources, I was never going to bring my store into a state of excellence. I was trying to hit standards, but what I needed wasn’t more labor. What I needed was time and space to network, learn and think about how to do that in a way that brought in revenue. I can tell you for sure, with my mind focused on how to get everything done so I could race home, sleep fast and hustle back to work – I was never thinking about the big picture. I was destined to kill myself in order to be mediocre. Ouch!
Here’s another story:
I used to work with a woman who over-worked herself daily. She insisted that everything with her name on it be perfect, meticulous. She was very unhappy and considering quitting. I remember asking her if she couldn’t just lower her standards for a bit. She was adamant that she couldn’t do a less than perfect job. She expected herself to deliver excellent work. She was unwilling to choose anything to leave undone.
She had a long commute so she rented a room near our office so that she could continue to work late. Her spouse remained at their home. Her unhappiness deepened. I asked again, why not just leave on time and see what happens?
She couldn’t bring herself to try it, even for a week. Instead, she left the company.
She basically drove herself to quit so she didn’t have to fail. The more perfect everything had to be, the further she got from the failure line, the less clear she was about how far she’d gone. She thought failure was one missing comma away when in reality it was a dozen minor details behind her. Diminishing returns are the most expensive.
Think about these stories. Can you see how the actions myself and my friend were taking were actually LESS helpful to our companies, families, and teams than if we’d given ourselves space to stop and take stock, regroup and refocus on what mattered?
Thought errors are easier to see in other people than ourselves.
That’s one reason we hire coaches. Nobody was making me scrub the floor under the shelves in my store on my knees. (Yes, I did that.) Nobody was making my friend deliver suitable-for-framing meeting minutes. Nowhere is this clearer than for my clients who own the business they work in. Everything they’re doing is literally up to them – and they too, suffer.
Even in endurance focused cultures where those who “sleep under their desks” are cheered, the rubber hits the road right under our own chair. Can we prioritize our work well? Can we tell people no? Can we accept some sub-par performance in less critical areas so we can deliver on the important stuff? Have we even stopped to think about what the most valuable work we can do today is? Can we just go the heck home when there’s still some work left to do? For many of us, we could, but we don’t. We want to please people, feel important and be excellent. Some of us are waiting for people above us in the chain to notice that we need relief and give us permission to stop the madness.
I’m not saying that we should never put in overtime. I’m suggesting that we set some guidelines for ourselves. I’m saying, figure out what you want to try, tell your manager what you’re doing and then do it. For a week. See what shakes out. And then try something else.
Don’t ask your manager to solve your work-life balance issue – quite frankly, they can’t. They can help, but in the end, you still have to do the important work and then get up and go home.
That, my tired friends, is having mercy on yourself –
And that? Is OK.
If you would like to have someone to bounce ideas off of – I’m here. Sign up for a free 25-minute session – Here. On me, no strings.
