Employee Engagement Education, Speaking, and Consulting
The following quote from an article about the Harvard Grant study demonstrated authenticity and realness in happiness.
“Only with patience and tenderness might a person surrender his barbed armor for a softer shield. Perhaps in this, I thought, lies the key to the good life—not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid, but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises. ”
“One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” – Neil Armstrong
When I was 4-years old living in Regina Saskatchewan and had nothing to do on sunny August days, my mother would hand me a can of water and a paint brush. With can and brush in hand I would paint our red wooden front steps. Before I got to the top step, the bottom step was already dry, so I would climb down the steps and start over, a four-year old version of Sisyphus. Yet, there was a childhood delight in seeing the dry red flakey steps glisten, albeit momentarily, when brushed with the cool water.
You see, I was a painter learning about the power of engagement.
The word of work for today is steps:
What are your steps at work?
Are you in step?
What is your next step? •
Are you ready, willing, and able to step up to your next challenge?
There are many steps we follow. We might use a 5-step method for serving customers and good teams synchronize their steps to create outcomes.
Let the word step seep into your sense of work today. Note the steps you are taking, reflect upon the steps you took yesterday, and ensure you take the vital step of moving from contemplation to action steps.
So, what’s your next step?
A poetic nudge on your career development from John O’Donohue’s, A Morning Offering:
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
Today at Work in Winnipeg, it is -50 celsius with windchill.
Now that’s cold. To keep warm I have collected the best cartoons by John Junson from his Today at Work collection from 2018.
When we laugh, we indulge in a short humor break and boost to rejuvenate ourselves and maybe even keep us warm!
John has created over 600 cartoons on work for the Employee Experience and Engagement network. I encourage you to use his cartoons today in your work.
To view the collection visit: http://www.davidzinger.com/wp-content/uploads/Today-at-Work-2018.pdf
I believe one of the biggest barriers to full engagement in work is fear. Fear arrives in many forms. One form I am familiar with is procrastination. We put off. We delay. We think we lack good time management or tenacious willpower.
What we lack is a way to tackle the fear that surrounds being engaged and the answer resides in moments. The fear can range from the idea that even if we do our best it won’t be good enough to not even knowing how to do a task and afraid to ask for help.
We can often do in moments what we can’t do in grand plans, big strategies, and “smart” goals because moments shrink fear to something so small that we are no longer afraid.
Here is a simple equation to explain this:
Engagement = Moments > Fear
The next time you encounter personal disengagement and you believe fear is lurking behind the scenes I encourage you to remember this statement:
Moments shatter fear into tiny fragments that can easily be managed and overcome.
Take your next moment, separate it from the herd of endless time, and focus your work in that moment. When you start to string or stack together many moments you may even surprise yourself about what you can accomplish. The poet, William Blake, encourages us to see the world in a grain on sand…
Engage along with me, our best is yet to be.