7

Choosing Change

I began this book hoping that hope would be your catalyst for seizing opportunities and controlling of your workday. Congratulations! You took some time to read this book, took some action, and hopefully found something of value. My goal in this last chapter is to bring us back to the beginning framework so that the roadmap for workday happiness is a springboard forward.

Remember, our engagement with our work is like any relationship: Hard work is required to sustain it, some days are better than others, change and compromise are required, and sometimes you move on amicably as it may not be meant to last forever! I wonder what happened to those three enthusiastic people from Chapter 1 who were new to their jobs and who were so happy just to be working.

I never saw them again. As the 2017 holiday grew in frenzy and impatience and things went wrong with customers, coworkers, managers, and life, how did they handle it and did they sustain their initial engagement? Or maybe they found different jobs or maybe they had to stay where they were because they needed that income, location, and/or whatever benefited them.

I don't know if you were like these three people when you started out in your current job, role, or career. As I think back I remember sometimes being like them and sometimes taking a job because I needed the income and knew deep down that the job and I were not a match. I maintain that it was still up to me to engage and bring my best self to work. Sometimes I succeeded; sometimes not.

Your “Before” profile/current work profile can be the starting point right now. It's your turn for a “Before” and “After” profile and it is your own scenario and your own reality. Each chapter had “Reflection and Action” suggestions at the end; it's helpful now to go back to these for any insights or ideas.

Your “Before”/Current Work Profile

An important step is to both think about and actually write things down about your current situation. You can use these guided reflections to develop a picture of your situation. Reflect and consider:

1. My current job/role is a:
   • Dream job.
   • Stopgap.
   • Stepping stone.
   • Springboard.
   • Other.
2. Relationship phase:
   • Honeymoon.
   • Honeymoon is over, now faced with reality.
   • Need some help to try new things.
   • We can work it out.
   • Time to prepare to move on.
   • Other.
3. What would you like to improve?
   • Your engagement.
   • Your productivity.
   • Your work satisfaction.
4. Current assessment.
   • Your gains from work.
   • Your productivity challenges.
   • Your sources of chaos.
   • Your major dissatisfactions.

Relationships Need Roadmaps

The realities that are part of this book—in the examples, scenarios, and stories—can be pretty harsh and at the same time are realities that many of us face. I want to share a big secret: You are the leader of yourself and do not need a special title. This book's roadmap is intended to provoke insights, challenges, and ideas for you to act upon to improve your workday. However, there is still a lot of work for each person who wants a good workday. There is no magic to changing your boss's micromanaging style, your email volume, coworkers' personalities, or department confusion. But, there are actions that can make things better.

Remember the list from Chapter 1 in which we identified some of our common workday hopes and needs:

• Wanting to have some control over our work and the workday.
• Needing clear and achievable work expectations.
• Having good work relationships with coworkers and colleagues.
• Having some downtime to refocus, re-energize, and renew.
• Feeling connected and not being alone with problems.
• Being somewhere between boredom and unhealthy stress at work.
• Being treated fairly and contributing honest results to our organization.

I look at this list and hope you see what I see: that it is possible to go get what you need instead of waiting for answers, improvements, and positive changes to come to you. Figure out what you need (test for reasonableness) and what is within your influence, and go get it: feedback about how you are doing; clarity about goals, resources, and deadlines; more respectful treatment; or a new job.

The title of a magazine article attracted me when I was in line at Whole Foods: “How to Love Your Job Again When All You Want to Do Is Quit.” It continued, “A recent report . . . found that less than 50 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs.”¹

Even though you can change jobs and that could be the right path, you don't want to change jobs and find yourself facing the same challenges. The article lists eight ways to fall back in love with your current job; some of these actions are the same ones we looked at in depth. But the last action that the author suggests is:

Feeling powerless is a common cause of worker dissatisfaction. Remind yourself . . . , you always have the power to quit . . . ; you simply choose not to exercise the power for now.²

This is a great mindset to take with you. And here's another benefit about falling in love with your job again: Even if you decide someday to leave your current role or organization, chances are strong that you will find similar problems in the new department, team, organization, and in yourself. The road-map contains strategies and tools that will be part of your success and happiness wherever you work and whatever you do.

A Good Roadmap Workout

Before you use the roadmap for your “After” profile, I have another person to tell you about. I will never forget her from one of the workshops. She knew herself, her role priorities, was active in problem-solving, valued her time and energy, and was a skilled communicator who confronted and proactively conquered chaos.

Let me put you in a situation similar to the one she was experiencing when I met her. Imagine you are an administrative professional supporting an executive at a large scientific research organization and imagine the responsibilities, details, volume and importance of emails, conversations, arrangements, meetings, reports, and conferences that you have to track each day.

However, your work space is located close to the large printing center (you have your own copier and printer). Every quarter, large numbers of new employees—a new hire cohort—would arrive, for the most part young and enthused to be working in your organization and the culture greets them warmly each year.

These new employees, who are working in an office environment perhaps for the first time, have different personalities and seem to assume that you, because you are nearby and in an administrative role, are the one to go to for printer/copier problems. There are instructions and a help desk number posted, but most people want immediate help in the form of another person taking care of the situation.

Now, see and feel the chaos of a string of interruptions each day when the various newcomers run into problems. Constant disruptions all day long make it hard for you to get back to focusing on your work along with sapping your energy.

David Rock's book Your Brain at Work has compelling information about the need to manage external distractions. “The challenge is that any distraction however small diverts your attention. It then takes effort to shift your attention back to where it was before the distraction. ”³ The person I am telling you about must have known about “how much energy is involved in high-level thinking such as planning and creating,”⁴ which was an important part of her executive support role. So what would you do? You could:

• Get angry, grumble, and complain to other people, blaming the interrupters for any work delays or lack of quality in your work.
• Complain to your executive.
• Suffer constant interruptions to your day.
• Use your power/status to tell them you don't work for them.

What is your solution?

• Take some time to think about what you would do and how you would feel and react.

Here's what our example employee did: She knew her priorities and need for focus and that the natural challenge of her cubicle's location would bring constant interruptions. So, she developed a plan and obtained support from her leader.

She greeted each new employee warmly, introduced herself, and told them that she gave each person one “printer orientation” and that after that they were on their own. Problems still came up, but here's where her follow-through and strength kicked in. She did not jump up when new employees came back to her with their copying or printer problems. She was friendly and professional and said she needed to continue with her work; she reminded them that there was a help number posted in the print center. She said this in a confident and friendly way.

Individuals either called the help desk or asked another person for help. Now new employees were interrupting each other and guess what? Peer pressure kicked in and peers set the expectation for each other to learn to become independent with printing needs. They didn't want to be interrupted either.

The point of this exercise is that this person, who was extremely busy with her own responsibilities, came up with a proactive, long-term solution to cut down on some chaos for herself and others. She:

• Knew the importance of her role, focus, priorities, time, and energy.
• Welcomed and extended long-term help to new employees by showing them how to be independent.
• Was an assertive and strategic communicator.
• Confidently and pleasantly kept to her plan of not taking on printing responsibilities for new employees.
• Developed a plan to prevent chaos for herself and others.

This is informal leadership in action and is a determined mindset that anyone can adopt. I share this with you hopefully to inspire you to develop a plan to move forward from your “Before” profile to a new “After” profile.

Your “After”/Desired Profile

Review your “Before” profile and visualize what you would like to see changed in three to six months from now. Each chapter had “Reflection” and “Action” suggestions at the end; go back to and review these for any insights or ideas. Imagine your desired situation:

1. My job/role is a:
   • Dream job
   • Stop gap
   • Stepping stone
   • Springboard
   • Other
2. Relationship phase:
   • Honeymoon.
   • Honeymoon is over, now faced with reality.
   • Need some help to try new things.
   • We can work it out.
   • Time to prepare to move on.
   • Other.
3. Decide how high you want these workday qualities to be:
   • Your engagement:
   • Your productivity:
   • Your work satisfaction:
4. Desired state.
   • Your gains from work.
   • Your productivity challenges within your control.
   • The sources of chaos that you are under your control.
   • How you will address your workday dissatisfactions (the ones under your control and the ones outside of your direct influence).

Next comes what may be the hardest part: What will you do and how will you do it? Will you choose to change anything to reach your desired workday profile?

Change Is Good, Right?

There's something about personal change, and a t-shirt with a Dilbert cartoon summed it up well. The front said, “Change is good,” but the back of shirt said, “You go first.” I go back to my own words in the Introduction because accompanying the roadmap, the scenarios, strategies, research, and tools is the fundamental challenge of seeking the quantum change that Stephen Covey wrote about.

As you read the scenarios and considered the approaches and ideas, you may have thought, “Why don't they just stop or start or change the way they act?” If you think about it, when you are in your own workday scenarios, is it easy to change your beliefs, thinking, and/or reactions? We may have experienced a challenge anytime we have tried to form a new habit, learn something new, or struggled to stop doing something.

So if there is a strategy, tool, skill, or idea that you want to try, it may not be easy for you to change and also for others who work with you. People will react and your “new way” may be tested, rejected, or even sabotaged before what you are trying can be established. I have heard many times from many workshop participants about how hard it is for them to be assertive, to say no, or change something they already know would make their workday better. Think about it: You probably already knew some or all of the strategies and tools from the roadmap. I think that it is putting these things into the workday that is the hardest part. A wake-up call is needed and even then it may not be enough, as you see from this research.

Even dramatic events are not necessarily wake-up calls but these can be the start we are going to discuss in the next section. In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock says, “A study found that only one in nine people who underwent heart surgery were able to change their lifestyle, and these people had the ultimate ‘motivation’: possible death.”⁵

The Wake-up Call

We need some kind of a starting point, sometimes called an “aha moment”; the insight that is like a wake-up call. I shared one of my moments with you when I wrote about my Saturday morning and tension at a copying/shipping center. Grumbling as I walked along, it hit me that I had this workday in front of me and I was so negative even though this was work I sought and had dreamed about. David Rock describes what happened to me:

Insights also come with an energetic punch. You can see it on people's faces, hear it in their voices, and see it in their body language. You can even sense it during a telephone call. It's obvious when you know what to listen for. An insight is a moment when things change.⁶

The insight is exciting and gives us energy, desire, and motivation, which we will need for the challenge of whatever it is we want to change, add, stop, try out, improve, accomplish, or learn. We have to get fed up enough, dissatisfied enough, excited enough, or even shocked by a photo, feedback, or someone's (from our family or workplace) reaction to us; that we change our ways of seeing things, shift our perspective, and see something else for ourselves.

The wake-up call can be sudden like it was for me that Saturday morning, or it can be a gradual building up to a change. Maybe you are tired of coming home upset from work every day to brood and not really leave it behind, and you realize that you have another choice. Just the act of realizing that you have a choice is a positive shift toward something else. At least you got off the couch, maybe got angry at tossing away workday time to interruptions, went to a ballgame, or thought about your résumé update!

Action

The wake-up call needs to lead us to action; however, if we want true new results from these new actions, we need to connect our actions with our beliefs, goals, and mindsets.

Remember the actions that were suggested at the end of Chapter 2:

• Take or review a personality assessment.
• Establish or review your long-term goals and dreams.
• Seek feedback to increase your self-awareness and emotional intelligence.
• Develop your own positive mindset.
• Have a good talk with yourself every day, at the beginning, during the day, and at the end.

Some of these suggestions are easier than others because we will need to question, challenge, and move out of our comfort zone. That comfort zone is cozy and also has a strong pull for many people. That comfort place is also usually feedback free so there is no danger of getting defensive or threatened by information we don't like or really want. I know people who have taken various personality assessments and feedback tools and then tossed them in the trash. Okay, a superficial action won't do much to change your workday.

I have seen, taken, and facilitated many good tools through my work with customers: personality, teamwork, conflict management, leadership styles, 360-degree feedback, and so on. Two people take a personality or team player assessment. One person looks at his or her results and thinks there's something interesting, files it, or tosses it away. Another person looks at his or her results, is annoyed with something, curious about something, and seeks more information. This person may actually end up using the results to improve his or her communication and work relationships. That is exciting to see and hear someone get an insight from an initial annoyance, cringe, or curiosity about how others see them.

I remember one person in particular who looked at her team player results and told me she was not happy with the results. She began to blame the tool, the research, and me; I remember making neutral comments about viewing any assessment tool results as data for our consideration. The next day, she came up to me and said she was still not happy and intended to change the way others perceived her at work. She stands out positively in my experience with many people as someone who was going to take her unhappiness and dissatisfaction as a catalyst to move to action.

Understanding the need and benefits of workday change are not enough; understanding is not the same as doing. A 2016 Psychology Today article states, “If you've ever read a self-help book or article, understood the message, and yet skipped over the exercises, you know exactly what I mean. This is the equivalent of going to the gym and having someone explain how to use a treadmill but then never getting on it.”⁷

I appreciate the author's image of learning about the treadmill but not using one; I work with many people who would like to change their behavior and learn skills from a course or through reading. Although these are good starts to increase knowledge and understanding, the new skills usually come from practice, encouraging and helpful coaching, and doing it again and again. Not only do we have to act but also struggle against gravity's pull.

Gravity Pull

You know that when we try to change at the individual, team, and organizational level, there is a natural force cheering and pulling for the status quo. Established habits, routines, and expectations are powerful forces that can seem safe, nonthreatening, steady, reliable, “tried and true.” So even positive changes for the better—to reduce chaos, innovate, branch out—will require persistence, help, and management.

Earlier I wrote about a challenge of change, that not only do we have to manage our own change but that others (who have their own need for certainty and gravity pull) would probably push back against us. Several powerful forces make up this very human resistance to change:

• Some beliefs and habits are deeply embedded.
• Concerns and fears may be valid.
• We don't all have the same perspective, experience, or information.
• We have a need for certainty, a need to know what to expect.
• Emotions are involved.
• Change requires good communication, reinforcement, and renewal.

Since forces are in place to maintain the status quo, what can you do?

• Set goals toward dreams that you really want.
• Look forward, imagine, and visualize the benefits of your changes.
• Establish some new realistic habits and routines.
• Stay aware of your emotions and emotions of other people.
• Tell your coworkers (and family) what you are doing and why.
• Get some encouraging and supportive people around you.
• See yourself as a resilient, determined, and positive workday warrior.
• Remind yourself of your past success with making changes.

Keep learning and read further into the resources I've used in this book and ones that I haven't mentioned—Stephen Covey's and David Rock's works in particular have made a great impact on me and helped me to change some beliefs and habits.

I want to leave you with what I think is very good news from Stephen Covey: “Whatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits.”⁸

Your Action Plan and Next Steps

Think about your “Before”/current workday profile and compare it to your “After”/desired workday profile. The roadmap we have used can help to close the gap between your current situation and your desired workday. You can reflect on each roadmap section acknowledging both your strengths and areas to improve or build.

Manage Yourself

• Your strengths:
• Your areas to improve or build:

Focus on Priorities

• Your strengths:
• Your areas to improve or build:

Value Time and Energy

• Your strengths:
• Your areas to improve or build:

Communicate Effectively

• Your strengths:
• Your areas to improve or build:

Confront, Challenge, and Conquer Chaos

• Your strengths:
• Your areas to improve or build:

Choosing Change

• Your strengths:
• Your areas to improve or build:

Next, choose your top three most urgent areas to improve or build.

Considering the first and second parts of this action plan select your top three most pressing challenges related to your engagement, productivity, satisfaction, and overall workday happiness and list what you will do to meet these challenges.

Pressing challenge 1:

Actions:

Pressing challenge 2:

Actions:

Pressing challenge 3:

Actions:

Lastly, identify helpful resources and mindset:

• Identify your resources and support (examples: feedback, coaches, sounding boards):
• Describe the mindset (and your strengths) that will help you to accomplish your goals in this action plan:

A note about making action plans: It's best to be realistic along with reaching for improvements, especially as you go back to your chaotic workdays. The following are some examples of actions to meet pressing challenges that negatively impact the workday:

• Take a course in a certificate program as another step forward.
• Walk more; consider health and wellness.
• Have lunch with colleagues regularly to improve your work relationships.
• Acknowledge what you do get from your work and organization.
• Be honest about what you do contribute in work quality, and attitude.
• Look at your productivity challenges from the lens of problem-solving.
• Addressing your pressing challenges can lead to opportunities that you can't see right now.

Summary

Remember: Change is necessary if you want to make the most of your workday. I want to share some general observations from working with many people that also match my own experiences.

• Knowing what makes you happy (including family needs) and walking in that direction.
• Knowing how and when to speak up, push back, offer options, and draw a boundary.
• Shifting your mindset; you can go home tired by happy even from a crazy, chaotic workday.
• Making peace with, respecting, and enjoying time. I prefer a river image to the clock face—a river that is moving along with interesting stops along the banks and some rapids that bring not only excitement but learning, danger, and problems to solve.
• Not forgetting about the people.
• Getting some help, encouragement, cheering, and feedback because change is hard.
• Knowing that the workday holds opportunities you may not see.

There is power in numbers. First, look at your workday and make it better; and also get with a group of people and see what you can do collectively. There is even more power when effective strategies, tools, and language are shared and practiced by teams. (Now I will use the word “team” instead of the word “group” since doing this signifies that that the group has grown or transformed into a team.)

I still believe that each workday is precious and filled with opportunities. I have had many work relationships and share with you that I have been in mismatched stopgap jobs, frustratingly slow stepping-stone roles, a springboard job that didn't propel me to where I wanted to go, and a dream job that had its own challenges; I have found that the big contributors to my happiness in all of these places were hope, change, and leading myself.

I wish you all the best ahead with your current work relationship and in all to come.

Now, go make the most of your workday!