Cross-training for Work and for Life

October 26, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Figuring out whether its time to look for another job is about more than how you’re treated as an employee and whether you’re acquiring valuable skills. Being appreciated and becoming more capable are important, but they’re not the whole story.

Whether your work is “the right fit for you” is also about whether the product or service your work is producing is making life better for those you care about. It’s whether your work gives you the sense of accomplishment and pride that comes from making the kind of difference in the world that you want to make.

If your work isn’t providing that, it’s not giving you enough.

Too many of us park our values at the door when we go to work. By doing so, we never access the deep-seated motivation that comes from contributing (even in a small way) to something larger than ourselves. This kind of positive energy not only carries us over the humps in the workday, it also produces an afterglow that extends into our lives after work.

Spend some time today thinking about the work you do. If it’s providing something you feel is making a positive difference, tap into that value chain more deeply so that your sense of accomplishment is enhanced. Talk to satisfied customers, find ways to collaborate with valued suppliers or company partners in your community. Join fellow workers who are doing the same thing. Expand both your inputs and outputs to experience how the work you’re doing is having an impact in ways that are important to you. However much your company will benefit from this, you will benefit more.

On the other hand, when you look critically at your work, it may be impossible to find “the value proposition.” Our 24/7 consuming economy produces an endless stream of products and services with no thought about whether they actually improve anyone’s life. If you’re taking no more than a paycheck from your work on what amounts to a deadening production line, it’s time for you to find a job that’s also energizing and life affirming.

There are lots of ways to start doing so.

It’s not just thinking about what you’ll be doing tomorrow, but also what you want for yourself long term. (I Am (not) My Job). It’s taking your thoughts and grounding them in concrete plans to get the work that you want to be doing. (Vocational Training). Because we spend much of our waking lives on the job, it’s about getting the most out of our work everyday by preparing for it beforehand and then digesting what happened once the workday is done. (Get Ready for the Work of Your Life Everyday). If your line of work doesn’t justify this kind of time and attention, you should probably be doing something else.

It’s identifying working people you admire, because of what you can learn from them about work. (Neil Armstrong on Work). It’s about surrounding yourself with a supportive community that shares your work ethic (Being Part of Something Bigger Than Yourself) and having wise people who truly care about you when you’re swamped by your limitations and need guidance. (Can There Be Redemption in the Lance Armstrong Tragedy?) As important as anything, it’s about improving your value awareness so you never lose sight of what’s most important to you, either at work or in life. (The presidential candidates provide Different Marching Orders for Work That Makes a Difference).

This conversation is about cross-training for work and for life. Your worklifereward will come when each one is continuously energizing the other.

Get Ready for the Work of Your Life Everyday

September 5, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

You’re back to work after Labor Day, after one of the calendar’s great punctuation points. It’s a time for putting the pedal to the floor, to use some of the gas you’ve been storing up for the sprint to December.

When the weather starts ventilating in the stretch formerly known as Indian Summer, it brings not only the promise of cooler days but also of harvests to come. For most of us, change for the better “is in the air.”

This is the annual time (along with post-New Year’s resolutions) when you put to the test all those ideas you’ve been saving and plans you’ve been making during the lull in your work calendar. It’s when you start getting valuable feedback from what you’re doing differently. It’s the season of possibilities, of successes/failures, of two steps forward and one back. You can learn something everyday about whether you’re making your work what you need it to be—as long as you’re open to that deep learning experience.

No lessons are more important than what you find out from putting your ideas into action and your plans into practice. It’s essential to give yourself time to absorb those lessons so you can be more effective tomorrow and the day after. But it can be hard to give yourself more time when it seems that you’ve just given yourself so much time.

However effective summer downtime was at replenishing you—that is, however much sun and water you managed to soak up—taking small intervals of time off everyday once your “back to work” can be just as essential. It is these daily allotments of time-for-yourself that will enable you to integrate what you’re learning as you strive to realize your work goals.

For example, should you double down on the path you’re set for yourself, tack a little to the left or right, or start moving in a whole new direction? These are questions you should be asking yourself everyday when you’re actively road-testing your plans to become happier and more productive.

Since there is an opportunity to be more effective when you’re trying to get where you want to be, why not take advantage of it? Some simple suggestions.

Most of us are creatures of habit, particularly when it comes to looking forward to something. My dog Rudy (who is somewhere north of 100 in human years) still manages to remember to come over for a treat—same time/same place every night. We’re like this too once the rewards start coming for us. The confidence that comes from having more control of the work path you’re on will be that reward for you.

As a creature of habit I recommend that you give yourself 15 minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time at the beginning, middle and end of every day. Thinking of yourself as an engine, these are the times to:

1. Prime Your Engine,

2. Re-Charge Your Battery, and

3. Recalibrate.

It’s a daily effort to learn, to replenish and most of all, to integrate by putting it all back together.

You Prime Your Engine when you first wake up: before coffee or other interruptions. Go somewhere that’s quiet and dim. You still have access to what your unconscious and sleepy mind is telling you. Listen to it. Think about what your dreams and “your gut” are saying to you about the day before and the day ahead. Don’t force it. Just relax and let it come. Have a pad handy and jot down notes if you want. Then go about doing whatever you do everyday. 15 minutes, and you’ll have some marching orders.

When you throw yourself into work the way I do, you don’t need to eat at mid-day as much as you need to absorb and relax. A great way to Recharge Your Batteryis by taking a short walk outside, either alone or with others, where you can be flooded with nature. A park, a garden, the woods out back: what you want is detail for your senses to body surf through. Look at it, smell it, feel it and let you mind wander through it as your walking. The sense-awakening effects of nature will help you to absorb the morning and start looking forward to the afternoon. Try it. You’ll be surprised. (And then have lunch.)

You Recalibrate Your Engine just before bed. Research in neuroscience is confirming that your mind continues to process while you sleep and dream—especially issues with an emotional component. What are you afraid of? What is the piece of the relationship puzzle you’ve been unable to find? In the lights-down-low/quiet-time before sleep, “give your dreams a path to follow” a question to resolve, a barrier to get around. You’ll pick up the thread the next morning.

We don’t give ourselves enough quiet time, enough time alone, or enough time with nature. I’ll talk about these different stages of Engine Maintenance—and some of the thinking behind them—at greater length another day.

In the meantime, no day is better than today to start taking regular time with yourself to get ready for the work of your life.

The School’s Values Are Not Enough

July 30, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Schools have their own values, but those values alone are not enough to guide our kids to fulfilling lives and work. Actively providing students with this kind of direction is something all of our schools should be doing.

When it comes to values, schools most commonly foster environments where I should respect you and you should respect me. Extraordinary schools extend this by encouraging you to care for me and for me to reciprocate in a caring way towards you. Tolerance for another’s viewpoints is another school value, as is encouraging active engagement as citizens in the community.

What schools are aiming for with these positive values is something that looks a lot like this—with the well-meaning community outreach going on in the distance.

peaceable kingdom — THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM by Edward Hicks

What our schools are not doing is actively helping students identify what is most important to each of them, in terms of their values?

That many of our schools are providing a righteous and nurturing environment is certainly a good thing, but positive environmental factors alone don’t help students connect with their most basic operating principles. Because most schools aren’t helping students “to make sense” of their education at this level, more and more rudderless young people are leaving our classrooms and stumbling their way into work and into life.

Most school values, like respect and tolerance, don’t leap into the hearts of students, providing clarity around questions of life and work. Instead, they essentially provide a warm bath where a student can feel safe and supported enough to potentially identify what he or she believes in. While the kind of active, mutual caring championed by education scholar Nel Noddings could lead to purposeful living and working, few schools today can help to ensure that if you care for me I will care for you back. As a transmittable value to students, mutual caring seems unrealistic in all but the most intimate school environments.

Encouraging civic engagement in the ways that Thomas Sergiovanni has talked about it also would not work as a vehicle for transmitting values from school to student in most of our schools. For Sergiovanni, students become “virtuous” by actively practicing virtues (like hope, trust, civility and piety) while working with “moral teachers.” As with “mutual caring,” a student’s own value choices are more actively encouraged in “the virtuous school,” but this model also seems unworkable in all but the smallest and most elite institutions.

In most schools, student engagement in civic affairs is limited to activities that leave everyone “feeling good” about themselves at the end of the day, but encourage neither commitment nor personal growth from the participants. It’s planting the community garden, reading to the elderly in a rest home: low impact activism that requires minimal effort for minimal impact. Schools, students and parents can pretend that some kind of value training is going on here, but everyone knows that it’s not.

So while schools often provide students with a warm Petri dish of tolerance and respect in the hope they’ll flourish, most fail to add the critical ingredient—which is actively teaching our kids how to cultivate their values so they can integrate what they’ve learned in school with what’s most important to them as individuals.

Earlier this month, I talked about some of the things schools can do in terms of building value awareness and helping students plan for their lives and their work. Exercises like this give students a roadmap that can help them to seize their futures instead of wandering aimlessly into them. We’re doing a very poor job providing our kids with this kind of preparation. It’s a problem for students leaving school at all education levels, and as I’ve written about before, even for the best and the brightest among them.

This is a tragedy that can be avoided.

It has profound implications for families, employers, communities, and most importantly the students who are graduating into life unprepared for its most basic challenges and opportunities.

Why are we so passive about this as parents?

Why aren’t we more concerned about this as teachers?

Policymakers and business correctly provide financial support and expertise for our non-performing schools. Why aren’t they also concerned about the purposeless students coming out of our performing schools, and the associated opportunity costs for our nation and our economy?

These aren’t just rhetorical questions.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts.

Vocational Training

July 20, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

People who go on to make a real difference have one thing in common. They have prepared themselves for it by becoming more “thoughtful” and “committed.”

The process begins by developing your value awareness, discussed in the last post. While our schools can provide an ideal environment for deepening your understanding of your values, values training can be undertaken at any time or place in your career. So can planning for the transition from where you are today with your work to where you want to be. You plot your course to energizing and fulfilling work by making a plan, and then following it.

I learned about personal business planning from a mentor in the venture capital community early on in my career. I was getting ready to launch a start-up, and kept talking to him about how I wanted my business to help people. He pulled no punches when he said at the time: “make your money first, and once you make enough of it you can do all the helping you want.”

My expression then (and after similar exchanges) must have told him I was unconvinced. As a last resort, he suggested I prepare a personal business plan to get a better grip on my motivations. Maybe that exercise would straighten me out.

Well it did, but not in the way he intended.

Values are the fuel — Values are your fuel

The deeper I got into this planning exercise, the more my initial goals were confirmed, and the clearer my future direction became. What did I most want to do and why? What am I “best at,” and what were the most revealing demonstrations of the “highest and best” roles I had played—both at work and outside of it?

The goal of the plan was the job I was seeking. To identify it, I needed to know why it was the right job for me. In other words, that I’d be accomplishing something I felt was important and that I’d feel fulfilled at a very basic level while doing it. While this required familiarity with my principles and improved “value awareness,” it also required identifying real world opportunities where my values could fuel my work.

What was my right job? Could I find it or would I have to create it? This required research. What are people I admire doing? How did I see myself helping people? What is the work that’s already being done to help in this area, and where are the opportunities for me? What do I need in terms of salary and job security? Questions like these: I needed to find answers to all of them.

My skills would be my work tools. For me, advocating, organizing, visualizing, problem solving, all were on my skill list, so I had to come up with examples of each that demonstrated my qualifications for the work I wanted to do. I needed to take my best shot proving the first part of the equation: that I could do it.

Experience (the flipside of the equation that said “I had done it—or something like it—already”) would be described in terms of roles I had played. Times when I had had some success as a coordinator, prime mover, creator, or gatherer of resources to get something done—often after work, since many of us spend more time excelling in our personal lives than we do in our working ones.

clutter_iStock_000009700659XSmall — Planning plots your course

Skills and experience: two different ways to illustrate what I had to bring to the party.

A personal business plan aims at lining up what you’re best at and what you’ve done in your life that you’re most proud of in order to demonstrate your suitability for a job that will bring you similar measures of pride and satisfaction.

Instead of trying to shoehorn yourself into a job you don’t want to do, you are actively pursuing work that you have already been getting ready to do during the most centered and accomplished moments of your life.

That may well be your definition of work that matters.

As such, it is work that is worth striving for.

Learning how to become more “thoughtful” about the work you should be doing, and more clearly “committed” to its goals has everything to do with preparing yourself for it.

Personal business planning is a valuable way for you to become more thoughtful about your work.

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which is taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)