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Career Zingers # 24: Beauty Is Not About How We Look, It Is About How We See

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To find beauty, see with fresh eyes

Susan, my wife, received some lovely roses. After a number of days I was ready to throw them out as they were withering. Susan stopped me, she cut the stems and put the roses in a new vase. The next morning while I was eating yogurt and granola for breakfast, I found myself staring at the roses. They were not new, they were not fresh, but they were beautiful. After reading this post, I encourage you to find beauty in yourself or in others even as you and others age and wither. Beauty is not about how we look, it is about how we see.

Career Zingers #20: Tilt and Flip

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In the game called your career, what puts you on tilt and how do you flip out of being tilted?

To play pinball well we must know just how much we can shake the machine to alter the ball’s path in our favour without tilting the machine and ending the game, and we also want to keep flipping the ball back into the game area where we can score points. If you imagine your career as a game of pinball, what puts you on tilt and how do you flip out of it?

Tilt. Do you know who or what puts you on tilt, shutting you down, and leaving you feeling “out of the game.” Do you have common triggers and habitual ways of responding to being tilted? Once tilted, how long, in minutes, hours, or days, does your emotional and mental tilt leave you shut down.

Flip. After you have been tilted how do you flip your career ending tilt around? Do you have a specific routine, person, or mental perspective that renews or rejuvenates your career quest?

A Momentous View of Employee Engagement

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Can you give me a moment?

I believe that employee engagement is significant, enriching, enlivening, and real when we distill engagement into moments. The paradox is that moments strung together can create something momentous – very important: having great or lasting importance.  My definition of employee engagement is good work done well with others every day. We must determine the moments to do good, the moments that can go well, the moments we share with others, and key moments of every day. Once we know the moments then we need to instil the actions or behaviors that make these moments so engaging. What are you going to do the moment you finish this post to make your own work or someone else’s work more engaging? Don’t just think your answer, engage the moment with a living behavioral response.

Career Zingers #12: The Fiction of Our Career

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“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” – Mark Twain

Photograph by David Zinger from Abu Dhabi Louvre Museum

Is your career a work of fiction? I think most of us believe our career is non fiction – based on facts, real events, and real people. On the surface most of us fail to recognize our career is a work of nonfiction – a story of imaginary events, invention and fabrication as opposed to mere fact. It it time to fully acknowledge the centrality of nonfiction within our career because:

  1. We must realize how much our internal thoughts and stories influence all of our career experiences, emotions, and actions.
  2. We are both the protagonist and writer of our career story and therefore have choice and authorship in how we understand our career and how we act in mundane and challenging situations.
  3. We are not prisoners or victims of a malevolent author (job, boss, marriage, health) — like all experienced writers we must realize the bulk of our work consists of constant iteration and revision.

As Thomas M Cirignano stated: “Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.”

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David Zinger is a career, engagement, leadership, and work engagement expert. David fully resonates with the lyrics of Kris Kristofferson “a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”

Engaging Zingers #6: Stop Trying to Be Great — Be Good!

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Career Zinger: Doing good work is the pathway to career success.

Ed Sheeran had the biggest hit song of 2017: Shape of You.

Bernadette Jiwa, in writing about 12 lessons derived from the biggest hit of the year stated:

You have to put yourself into the situations that give you the best chance of doing great work.”

The best situation I know to give yourself a chance for great work is to continually strive to do good work. For three years I have been adamant in defining work and employee engagement as: “good work done well with others every day.” If you do good work every day, once in a while the situation may arise that you will stumble into great work.

Stop trying to be great, be good!

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David Zinger is an expert on employee engagement with a keen focus on career engagement for 2018.