The moment you can accept that others think differently, that things happen no matter what you want or what you do, that nobody out there sees you as someone intrinsically deserving praise or criticism, that’s the moment when you can find peace of mind and set to achieve your goals.
The longer you can sustain that acceptance, the better of you will be.
What’s keeping you from achieving more, being more motivated, completing that task or project?
Each one of us will have their own answer, but in an organisation, the most common answer must be meetings.
Meetings without an agenda and a list of actions to follow up with.
Meetings that are updates.
Meetings that should have been an email or a Slack message.
Meetings to give feedback on a piece of work you have never seen before.
Meetings that are workshops that aim at fixing a problem with participants who have no idea what the problem is, let alone the skill set to fix it.
If you are a manager of people, your first responsibility should be to rid their calendars of meetings.
The way people will think of you does not depend on how productive you are, on your job title, on your responsibilities, on how much money you make, on the number of meetings you attend, on how often you share your opinion.
The way people will think of you does depend on how you make them feel when you are around.
How supportive you are.
How helpful you are.
How kind you are.
How listening you are.
How empowering you are.
Our set of values is often completely off the mark.
If you can’t live with pain. If you can’t live with boredom. If you can’t live with failure and disappointment. If you can’t live with repetition and rejection.
Then you will not be ready to embrace the opposite.
You will not be ready to embrace life at all.
When others are not at their best, we unconsciously start a balancing act between our best self and our lazy self.
What can I do to help? is a question that comes from our best self. We feel for the other person and we want to see if there’s a way for us to help them get back on track.
Of course, the answer to that question is often vague or undefined. People who are not at their best tend not to know what they need. And that’s when our lazy self kicks in. We quickly fall into old habits, we fail to keep the distress of the other person in mind, and we eventually resorts to habits that make us comfortable and safe. Our lazy self will always end up helping ourselves.
When others are not at their best, skip that question, even if well intended. Instead, keep the fact top of mind, and avoid asking the other person a favor, don’t put additional stress on them, forget about a rule or a habit that might be making their life more complex, praise them more often and say thank you to them at any possible occasion, bring them or buy them food, invite them out for a coffee or a tea, make them feel heard and listened to.
It’s a lot of hard work, but that’s how you make your best self prevail in these delicate circumstances.
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