I’ve had three conversations with clients and potential clients recently about the “how” behind thriving at work.
By that I mean:
If you’d like to stroll into the office each morning with a pep in your step and stay clear-headed under pressure, not get buried by the corporate hullabaloo and feel good while you’re going about your day, what skills do you need to learn to do that?
That’s the question these three were asking.
In case the subject line of this email hasn’t spilled the beans already, it might surprise you to hear that you don’t need to learn any skills to thrive at work like this.
In his must read book Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, Richard Carlson gives the example of a couple who’ve spent the first ten years of their marriage getting into constant powwows about their finances.
The husband can’t understand why his wife wants to save every penny, the wife can’t understand why the husband is so keen to splash the cash and any sensible discussion has long since gone out the kitchen window.
Carlson goes on to say:
Rather than defending their own positions, each needed to seek first to understand. This is precisely what I got them to do. He learned that she was saving to avoid her parents' financial disasters. Essentially, she was frightened of being broke. She learned that he felt embarrassed that he wasn't able to "take care of her" as well as his father did his mother. Essentially, he wanted her to be proud of him.
As each learned to understand the other, their frustration with each other was replaced by compassion. Today, they have a nice balance between spending and saving.
So where did that nice balance between spending and saving come from?
From learning empathy? Brushing up on their communication skills? Popping along to evening classes to learn how to negotiate better?
Nope.
It arose naturally from a deeper understanding of why the other person was acting as they were.
But it wasn’t the couple that did that. The understanding did it.
It works the same way with our jobs.
I don’t mean figuring out why our colleagues behave a certain way or why your boss keeps booking meetings at 5.30pm.
I simply mean understanding how work works and how we tend to respond to it.
Imagine it’s 2pm on a particularly spicy Tuesday. All your colleagues are losing their marbles, your inbox is going bananas and you’ve got a make-or-break meeting in two hours.
If you understand how work works, you’ll also understand that even though your colleagues are frazzled, you don’t need to be frazzled too. You’ll understand that your meeting will probably go better if you don’t rehearse it in your head 37 times. And you’ll understand that Outlook has many magical powers, but ruining your day isn’t one of them.
None of these are a skill.
It’s ALL an understanding.
In fact, thinking it's a skill is one of the very things that gets in the way of the understanding.
I’ve recommended Anthony De Mello’s barnstorming book Stop Fixing Yourself so often I wish I was on commission. The book is basically an argument against the idea that we need to constantly upskill ourselves.
In one part, De Mello writes about a scientist studying the habits of ants.
Clearly the scientist has no desire to change those ants’ habits. That would rather defeat the object of understanding what the ants are up to.
De Mello goes on to say:
The day you attain a posture like that, you’ll experience a miracle.
Change will happen; you will not have to bring it about.
If what you attempt is not to change yourself but to observe yourself — to study every one of your reactions to people and things without judgment, condemnation or desire to reform yourself — then you will notice a marvellous thing happening within you:
You will become transparent and transformed.
If that’s too woo-woo for your tastes, I’d simply say this:
Thriving isn’t something you learn how to do. It’s something that happens naturally when you understand yourself better.
This is where my group coaching program The Inside Job comes in.
Each month we jump on a Zoom call to understand yourself and your work more clearly. All so you can thrive at work rather than survive it.
12 people signed up for last month’s call. We're now gearing up for this month’s call at 7.30pm UK Time (2.30pm EDT, 11.30am PDT) on 2nd September.
Investment in the program is $20 a month and you can cancel your subscription whenever you like.
However…
I still haven’t loaded up my "all singing, all dancing" sales pages for the program yet.
So if you’d like to sneak into the program for a small discount, for the next 24 hours you can join for $15 rather than $20. And for as long as you stay signed up, the monthly cost will stay at $15 too.
The only fly in the ointment is there’s no snazzy sales pages to sink your teeth into before you sign up.
Whatever the case, if you’re ready to jump in, here’s the link:
The Inside Job
Use the code HULLABALOO to claim your discount. The code expires 24 hours from the time I hit send on this email.
To fulfilment,
Tom