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Employee Engagement: Learn to Love Your Bricks

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How fully do you engage with the work right in front of you?

one-brick

You know the story of the three bricklayers at the same work site.

When asked what they were doing one says, “I am laying bricks.” The next one says, “I am making a building.” The third says, “I am creating a cathedral.”

The story is often told as a moral story about seeing a greater purpose and meaning to your work. The third bricklayer is pointed out as a person with purpose. But I am partial to the first bricklayer who saw what was right in front of him. I am not opposed to cathedral builders and greater purposes but I believe we need to learn to love our bricks.

Feel your work.
See what you are making or doing right now.
Engage fully with what is right in front of you.
Dwell in the here and now.
Dedicate yourself to your bricks.
Be absorbed by your bricks.
Bring energy to your bricks.

We can always engage with the process even when we don’t have control over the final outcome. Know you did your work and you did your work well.

The church steering committee can always cancel the cathedral building project, your boss can fire you, the architect can demolish your wall, or an earthquake can crumble your building — but no one can take what you did away from you when you engage fully each day with your bricks.

There is an old zen saying,

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Just change the word enlightenment to engagement and work can give you all you will ever need in the moment of working.

Bricks can be each customer on the phone, the surgery you are doing right now, or the road you are navigating with your truck or bus.

Your brick is always the work right in front of you in this current moment.

Go ahead, get some kicks out of your bricks.

What’s your brick?

This post was inspired by my wife’s current experiences of work and is dedicated to Albert Johnson from Smiley Saskatchewan

 

—
David Zinger is an employee engagement expert and speaker whose bricks today were the chiclet keys on his keyboard and the words appearing on his screen.

 

 

Employee Engagement: Embrace Your Jagged Experience of Work and Wellbeing

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The New Balance in Employee Engagement is Jagged and Precarious

I know you have seen them. The stack of smooth stones that offer a visual of calm and tranquility. I confess that I have always been attracted to them and even used them on the cover of my first book, Zengage: How to Get More Into Your Work to Get More Out of Your Work.

Zengage Red

I trust you are also aware of the the increasing abandonment of the term work/life balance. Many say we can’t achieve balance because of how we work today and the influences of technology and the expectation to always be “on.”  It is problematic that we would use a balanced and smooth ideal image when jagged and precarious captures more of the lived experience of work, wellbeing and engagement for most of us.

Balance Rock Crayon 2015

 

Let’s embrace a new balance for work and life in 2016. This balance has rough edges symbolized by the third stone in this stack and balance is fleeting, temporary, and precarious as symbolized by the almost tipping top stone on the top of the stack. I believe 2015 asks us to get more comfortable with things being jagged. We need to find our equanimity in edges and crevices and cracks.

I placed some crayons beside the stones to symbolize our need to work and play with what we’ve got and not dream of everything being smooth. Zen perspectives embrace impermanence and ask us to stop being so smooth and rather to be mindful and accepting of what actually is.

I encourage you to embrace jagged work, such as:

  • Leaders who are frayed and flawed
  • Projects without enough time or budget
  • Fluctuating states of health
  • Energy that peaks, dips, and twirls
  • High degrees of uncertainty about future work.
  • Co-workers who can be just plain difficult

The new balance of life and work as we move towards 2016 is jagged, resilient, real, imperfect, and impermanent.

Learn to live it rather than trying to live up to some ideal.

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert and speaker who believes are best work can come when things are not smooth and balanced but rather jagged and precarious.