Archive for June, 2010
If you are dissatisfied at work, getting reacquainted with what really matters to you, may take some effort.
“Your values, personality traits, attitudes, and abilities are like the ingredients of a recipe,” says Julie Jansen author of I don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This: A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work. “Without knowing what they are, you will find it difficult to use these ingredients to help you create nourishing work.”
She suggests several steps:
1) Find a list of common values on the internet by typing “list of values” into a search engine.
2) Narrow the list to your own top ten by asking yourself which ones “you absolutely cannot live without.”
3) Think about your current worklife and decide if these are being expressed in any way.
More on Friday…
Are you feeling bored or unchallenged at work?
In Julie Jansen’s book, I don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This: A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work, she expresses the importance of taking a step back from the situation and focusing on yourself. “Whether you are wondering Where’s the Meaning? Or are Bored and Plateaued, the first thing you must do is get reacquainted with yourself so that you can focus your goals and energy in the appropriate direction.”
More on Wednesday…
View from Shorewood
Actor, businessman, philanthropist and race car driver Paul Newman caught the joy of reading early in his life. Here is “Newman’s Own” wonderful way to devour a book:
“When I was a kid, I used to go up into the attic with a good book, a glass of iced tea, and a bowl of popcorn.”
Last week I was lucky enough to give a talk with my dear high school friend, Leah Wedmore von Baintner, at the New Britain Public Library, our hometown library in Connecticut, about how much the library meant to us:
If you’ve ever watched NBC’s new show “Who Do You Think You Are?” you’ll have an idea of the kind of advice career consultant Nancy Anderson dishes up in Work with Passion in Midlife and Beyond (New World Library, 2010). The popular television series helps celebrities do research about their ancestors, often tracing their roots back more than a century. Typically these household names learn something surprising, like Sarah Jessica Parker’s connection to a young woman accused of witchcraft during the trials in Salem, Mass., or director Spike Lee’s likely ties to a Southern slave owner.
Anderson believes that people who are unfulfilled at work need to look backwards, too. In fact, she challenges readers to write their own autobiography, and to start by examining their parents’ and grandparents’ attitudes about money, work, and relationships. Why examine your family history? Anderson claims this exercise helps you identify patterns that you might have picked up along the way - good and bad – and figure out where they originated.
Anderson recommends that all fledgling memoirists refer to their relatives by first name only (“Ellen” rather than “mom,” for example), as a way to view their influences in a more objective light. “They will become people, not relatives,” she says, and “You can declare a moratorium on the stuff that doesn’t work for you.”
To help put the less productive influences of history behind you, Anderson suggests focusing your energies on your own strengths, values, and needs. Strengths are what you do easily and well. Values are the ways you consistently tackle problems when you are successful. Needs are the intangibles that you find emotionally satisfying, such as autonomy, creative challenges, and variety.
Finally, write down some goals to help you move towards a more satisfying worklife, but keep them small. “Change that lasts is, of necessity, a slow, gradual process,” she writes. If you select tasks that can be accomplished in a reasonable time period, you will become more accustomed to winning, she says. And that’s a habit you can happily pass down to future generations.
