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The Importance of Persistence

Personal Growth, Work Life February 21, 2014 Leave a comment

We admire someone with stick-to-itiveness, a person who single-mindedly pursues a goal. Persistence does not mean adhering to a specific path, but keeping eyes on the intended goal. Methods can change, as well as participants; even some aspects of the goal may be altered to achieve the essence successfully.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Builders of the past had amazing persistence, minus modern tools

Let’s say that you and your co-workers were sitting one day discussing a particular issue that affects your ability to get tasks done and a new person says that they know about software that will make the task much more efficient. Excellent! You share this information with your boss as soon as possible, but she lets you know that there just isn’t money in the budget. Blast, now what?

Well, you and your team mates could just continue to discuss the problem periodically and lament the stupid budget limitations. But you are persistent. You and your buddies split up some tasks to convince your boss that the software is the best answer. Some people do research on the software itself – how it works, some alternative software platforms, reviews from people who have used the software.

Another part of your group starts to track the time lost on the task using the current process, not only time within your team but within the organization as a whole, perhaps on the part of your customers as well.

Now you can go back to your boss with a great deal more information that includes information to calculate the cost of keeping things the same. You don’t necessarily have to compute these numbers (you probably don’t have enough of the data to do so anyway) but now the company can take a clear look and make an informed comparison.

Hopefully your persistence will pay off with a new solution to the methods in your task. If not, regroup and start to plot plan C.

“Plenty of men can do good work for a spurt and with immediate promotion in mind, but for promotion you want a man in whom good work has become a habit.”

~Henry L. Doherty

[We’ll purport for the sake of the modern age that Henry was not excluding woman in his thought on purpose, merely making assumptions of his era.]

(I must admit to rerunning this post from last year at this time, from my old blog. This wind seems to be blowing all thoughts from my head.)

Breaking the Escalation Pattern

Random thoughts February 19, 2014 Leave a comment

How many times do we see the news or hear about a situation when we think how did it get to that point? Why didn’t someone intervene, somehow put a stop to it?

When to step in? How to step in? Who should step in?

I don’t remember how old my boys were when I started to talk to them about the part they could play in keeping things from escalating to a point where there is a loss of control and something unfortunate results. Somewhere in their grade school years, long before their brains would mature enough to develop impulse control. (Of course, age doesn’t always correlate to impulse control.)

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The calmest among us still has a trigger or two – perhaps one or both of the universal triggers, hunger and lack of sleep. The calmest people are less likely to be set off by their very calm nature, do they also better understand how to take action to keep their surroundings more serene? Or how best to respond to chaotic surroundings to keep themselves serene?

We are under constant bombardment from outside forces – bills, relationship pressures, the world around us – which can keep us at a low simmer. Add in one more aggravation and it might make a volatile mix. What do we each do to understand our own simmer, our own triggers; what do we each do to counteract or prevent our triggers from being tripped?

Diffusing a volatile situation takes some skill, but helping ourselves, a friend or a family member to ease down their simmer is a much simpler and more pleasant task. Breaking the escalation pattern early, before it even has a chance to start, is sometimes as simple as getting a meal with a friend, sharing a laugh or offering a hug.

Directionless Progress

Random thoughts, Work Life February 14, 2014 Leave a comment

Let’s face it, sometimes it really isn’t clear what our next step should be – in our career or in life. We can ask friends, coworkers and family for assistance or suggestions and we will get varying opinions and conjecture but it is up to us to create the direction. Since we expect life to be ever advancing and improving we put a lot of import on making the right decision about direction.

Maybe it is our years in school that give us this impression of life as continuing advancement. We have to learn the basics to build on with later, more specialized classes – calculus won’t make sense until we know the fundamentals of math. Each grade builds on the information gained in previous grades, and school goes on and on for what feels like forever. But life doesn’t really work this way, so in that respect school hasn’t prepared us at all.

If only it were as simple as a video game where the arrows show up ahead as you drive to tell you the next stage of your route. Instead we have to explore, experiment and experience occasional false starts. Or seem to stay in place while the world moves forward without our active participation.

If we don’t have clear direction, can we really make progress? If we decide to change direction does that negate everything that we did toward our old progress? Who is to say that all of us are meant to click into a certain track in our early twenties and follow it through thirty odd years of a career without any pause or deviation?

I haven’t taken anywhere near a traditional path (assuming traditional is that set 30 year career track). I think that I’ve done all right with my progress despite some meandering directions – mainly because I have learned so much along the way. In fact, since learning has been a main goal, I could say that I really didn’t meander in my direction in that respect.

How do you define progress for yourself?

Anticipation Deficit

Random thoughts February 12, 2014 Comments: 3

Ten years ago this month much of my extended family was eagerly awaiting a planned trip to Ireland. Mom would travel with the boys and I, we would meet my brother and sister-in-law in Dublin. It was a wonderful trip and we still bring up highlights today, particularly poignant because mom died later that year.

Mom did most of the actual planning – she had been to Ireland twice already herself and she had more time. I didn’t really care too terribly about specifics, I had just always wanted to go. I did want to see a castle (and saw the outside of several, but we went in off season and most were closed, so a reason to plan a follow up trip one of these days).

There is plenty of research that gets touted that tells us anticipation is better for us than the actual event. Planning and preparing, imagining how it will be, having something other than or regular routine to capture our minds – this is powerful stuff.

I have been so busy slogging through the every day, and trying to catch up to a to-do list that is overfull that I haven’t given my anticipation deficit any thought until today. At Christmas my sister-in-law asked if this was the year for a family weekend at Wisconsin Dells since we have tried to plan one every couple of years. I had to nix it due to finances, darn it all. (There is something to be said for extending yourself for an experience, but also something to be said about getting yourself to a certain financial stability, too.)

I am good at planning for the practical both personally and professionally, but I am woeful at planning for enjoyable future activities. I get the idea to go somewhere and will start to read about the place, or I hear about an event that I probably would like; but then I get bogged down in the logistics or something else comes up to claim the money I would have put toward the experience.

When I do manage to get out of my regular routine, I am rarely sorry. But it is often last minute, therefore no boost from anticipation. Any suggestions to push through my planning barrier would be highly welcome.

It’s on a Loop

Random thoughts February 7, 2014 Leave a comment

Recently, I went to go see August: Osage County with a friend and there are moments from the film that are still with me. The main one that is looping around in my head is about trying to find a generous place in the heart for another person. It feels as though Tracy Letts is speaking to me.

Couldn’t we all benefit from a bit more generosity of feeling toward each other? Both offering it and hoping to receive it.

Valentine’s Day is looming – a time to think of love in all its various forms, though the day seems to be mostly devoted to romantic love. Love and a generosity of heart can be one and the same or not related at all except stemming from feelings. It is possible to love someone and yet not have generous feelings toward that person – think of sibling relationships in childhood particularly.

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I’ve ascribed this idea of a generous place in the heart as benefit of the doubt, but I like this more poetic and visual notion much better. Am I open to another person, are others open to me – do we identify with each other as fellow humans and not just a means to an end. We are each certainly aware when we feel that our own needs, our own humanity are overlooked or ignored. How often do we look into our own hearts to measure the generosity that we hold there – even what steps to we take to replenish it?

This is one of those things, like mindfulness, that can hold great benefit but require vigilance to review and maintain. Or at least periodic thought, no recriminations with a slip into a stingier mode, but a redoubling of energy toward generosity.

The fine thing about enacting generosity in this manner is that it is easy to start. I can let the person with fewer items in front of me in a checkout line. Or send empathetic thoughts toward the parent with the unruly child in a restaurant. I can ask someone I know to explain their reasoning before I assign one to them. And so on.

There is a great deal about relationships in this movie that I will continue to think about while I test out this idea of a generous place in the heart.

Asking the Wrong Thing of Someone

Personal Growth, Work Life February 5, 2014 Comments: 2

Is a person failing at a task when they simply do not have the right temperament to do the task? (I’m not talking about skill here.) Or did the person who set them to the task set them up to fail? Granted in the all too frequent situation of job insecurity these days, many people stretch in one way or another because any job that brings in a paycheck is better than the alternative. But we’ll set that aside too.

There are people who pick up rather easily on tasks, even someone complex ones, and others who will be great at the task but must be given time to learn it at what would seem to be a glacial pace to that fast learner, but is just right. Both of these temperaments will excel at the task once the training is done – but if the more deliberate learner isn’t given the time to make the task his or her own they will probably fail.

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Most people work better when they know their boundaries – my job starts here, covers this area, and ends here; anything outside that area belongs to someone else. A person with a collaborative mindset will fit perfectly into a job with overlapping responsibilities, while a person who is best when working entirely independently will struggle. A person who likes narrow boundaries will implode in a situation with nebulous boundaries – particularly if they are also cautious.

When I’m interviewing a candidate, I like to ask them what sort of student they are – not were, but are. This will tell me a lot about their temperament. Will they ask me to better define the parameters of the question – do I mean back when they were in school? What do I mean by student? Or will they dive in with a canned answer that they are up for anything and love to learn? This isn’t a trick question on my part (I don’t like trick questions.) No, I want to make sure that I won’t be asking the wrong thing of anyone. I don’t like to be set up to fail, and I will make every effort not to do so to anyone else.

Failure is a part of life, and can be useful sometimes. But we don’t need regular and unceasing doses of it with no end in sight. Being in a job where you are asked to do something counter to your temperament regularly is quite wearing.

Have you been there, what was your solution?

‘We Already Tried That’

Personal Growth, Work Life January 22, 2014 Comments: 2

I fear that these words have passed my lips at some point in the past and I imagine that they fell on the ears of the listener about the same way they fall on me when I hear them. Shut down, denied, rejected. Unintended enthusiasm killer.

I got together for brunch recently with some friends, we used to be co-workers, but now all work in other places. This phrase came up and stuck with me because it is a common thing to hear in many offices. New people mean new opportunities to examine old process and tasks in a new way. New people could be new to the company or new to the team with prior experience at the company in a different role.

When I first heard ‘we already tried that’ in response to something that I said, I was rather crestfallen and rolled the rest of my comment back up, folded my hands and clammed up. Now, I redouble my efforts to find a way to introduce the idea in a manner that will be palatable to the listener. Or if I overhear someone else get shot down, I try to help them get an opening to complete their thought.

My thought isn’t so much that we should take action on the idea itself as much as it is about giving people the opportunity to speak up and participate in solutions. Or the process for developing solutions. Maybe we really did try exactly that and it didn’t work at that time, in that manner. But that isn’t the point (plus this is a new time and maybe with a couple of tweaks the idea is valid again.) Maybe it didn’t work the first time for some sub reason that would no longer affect the outcome.

Imagine if we hadn’t allowed any new versions of Edison’s inventions? (public domain image)

The objective, purportedly, is to have engaged employees – ones who participate actively in creating solutions to the situations that invariably come up. This phrase is high on the list of reasons why employees stop participating and just trudge along. It is in my DNA to keep putting forth new suggestions, but this isn’t true for many people. Who knows how hard someone had to screw up their courage to put forth an idea to be told ‘we already tried that’ before the whole idea was out of their mouth?

We already tried to shoot down ideas with ‘we already tried that’ and it failed miserably.

Trail of Dots

Personal Growth, Work Life January 20, 2014 Comments: 2

Remember those fun sheets that we would get in those early years at school? Random numbered dots scattered on the page with the occasional squiggle or line or recognizable body part – and we would know what the picture represented after we connected the dots in numerical order. I’m sitting here right now thinking that those exercises where just about the best training for work, and life, that we got in school.

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This led to that, and sometimes you really had to search for that. Not to mention if you accidentally got out of sequence it could be a slow and messy clean up to start again. In the meantime you wouldn’t be able to tell what you had at all. (If only tracking down things now resulted in a cute little picture that I could happily color.)

The one aspect of dependencies that was represented on the page – maintaining the right sequence – had to stand in for others such as waiting on other people or working within system or program limitations. I suppose teachers were wise in keeping this one to themselves for a few more years. We were still busy learning the get along with others and sharing part, no need to muddy that yet.

Now that I am thinking about how these Connect the Dots exercises were so much more important than they seemed at the time – I wonder about how one went about constructing them? Obviously starting with the full picture, but the art, or science, was to determine the right points to keep so that the recipient couldn’t immediately guess the subject of the picture but would also not get confused.

Sometimes the designer made mistakes and left out parts or skipped a number and the puzzle couldn’t be completed as shown. This left the child hanging, or gave the child the opportunity to use their own imagination. Again, making this a great test for work and life – a low risk chance to practice what to do when instructions are wrong or incomplete for the task at hand.

Some days, by the end of the work day, my brain is only capable of the most rudimentary task. Maybe I should go out and get myself a book of these Connect the Dots and see if that will help my brain unwind from the more complicated trail of dots in life.

A Highly Developed Sense of Duty

Personal Growth, Work Life January 17, 2014 Leave a comment

I came home from work last night with a blog post idea floating around in my head. This isn’t it, I hope to retrieve it later and have it show up on this site at some point. No, I walked in thinking I would just start in on the computer but the dishes called out, and a load of laundry too. Once those things were no longer disturbing my sensibilities, I didn’t have it in me to write that other post.

This post is about the sense of duty that drove me to work on the chores first. Is it a gene, a cluster of brain cells, or something else entirely? Why do some people have this sense practically oozing out of their pores and others wouldn’t recognize duty if their existence depended upon it? And then there are the majority of people who have just enough to keep them from scampering off to Tahiti and instead make a life which includes a considerable dose of responsibility.

I believe that I’ve written about this before. And I will certainly write about it again. Dad was big on fulfilling duty first. His words and actions showed us daily. I wish that I had more of this trait when it comes to keeping my house in good shape, but I have plenty of ways that I relentlessly apply my energy to duty first.

“Let’s have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
~ Abraham Lincoln
(public domain image)

A sense of duty is a very helpful thing to develop and maintain – I am thankful to have it. However, I have spent the last few years seeking to balance this duty with other important things too. Time with people that mean something to me, opportunity to gain new experience, pleasant pastimes.

Now that duty has been met, I need to get my head back into the right frame for that other post. First I will wish for you a nice balance of duty and leisure in your weekend.

Show Me the Way to Catch Up

Personal Growth, Work Life January 15, 2014 Comments: 2

Fourteen or so years ago I remember talking to someone and telling her that I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that I was forgetting something. She helped me to talk through general things with my house, job, and kids so that we figured that there wasn’t anything glaring. We were operating on the assumption that my feeling must be based on something concrete – an actually overdue or nearly due to-do.

This conversation sticks in my mind because it marks the start of my current stage when I have learned to live with this feeling as a constant companion. Because I am forgetting things, those little things like all the personal, car, house maintenance that we should do to keep things tip top and running smoothly. And all the little things at work that would make other things less reactive.

We imagine that past generations had it a bit easier – indeed they didn’t have things like 401k accounts to rebalance, or HSA accounts for that matter. The types of insurance constituted a shorter list, and so lessened the bewildering amount of paperwork, rules and the like to track and decide upon. Working on the car didn’t require specialized skills or tools – diagnostics was what the doctor did when he depressed your tongue.

Public domain image, Bay Bridge

No matter, I would just like to break this feeling of falling behind. Knowing that I am not alone in this is some comfort, but not relief. And hiring an assistant would be amazing, but not in my budget. Friends and I often compare areas where we are ahead or behind each other – a little competition to spice up the endless race not to fall further behind.

(The title is hummed to the tune of “Show me the way to go home”… I’m tired and I want to go to bed…)