What do you do for a living?

How many people do you know, including yourself, may be, that find themselves in jobs where they feel inequitable   in terms of their skills and abilities and what the job really requires.

He must be quick to break those habits that can break him – and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.” (John Paul Getty)

Many people debate during my consulting journey and would say:” I agree that this is the job size and its right positioning, however, this is not my size or positioning!”

There are four types of jobs that you can do, as per Dr. Victor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy. The first ones are the hard to learn and hard to do. This type of job is like accounting or administration for a person who has no natural skill or ability in that area. It would be so hard to learn, and no matter how many years of experience you accumulate, it would be hard to do. Their work is always hard and seldom satisfying. How many people do you personally know that are in this trap?

A job that is hard to learn but easy to do is the second type. This can be a competency like Drawing Excel sheets with calculation formulas or conducting a surgery. It takes remarkable commitment and focus to acquire, yet once you have mastered it, it is quite easy to do, one time after the other. Regrettably, this type of job can become dull and boring and will stop stimulating you over time. It seldom causes you to draw out your potential and develop your talents.

The third type of job is a job that is easy to learn but hard to do. Like physical labor, like riggering, gardening, upholstery, Air Conditioning installation. It’s proportionally easy to become skilled at a physically challenging job, but it is constantly hard to do, no matter how extensively you do it.

The most significant category is the fourth, easy to learn and easy to do. You find yourself learning it so easily, and doing it so naturally, that you roughly forget when and how you learned it in the first place. Easy to learn and easy to do jobs are the best display of your likely and innate abilities and talents. This is where you exceed, get the best results, and earn the very most.

Obviously, you ought to explore continuously your activities and talents, in order to identify the things that you learn and do easily, these are the things that would stimulate you the most, and this is the job that would make you work eagerly, make the best results out of, and earn the maximum from.

It is true that no one would know your winners better than you, yet, if you do not make the effort to explore several jobs and see yourself performing them, you’d not be able to find your dream job. Once you do, and you start running your own business, you ‘d be focusing on the tasks that you’d like to do the most, and optimizing your productivity in them, while eliminating the jobs that you like the least, and this would ideally reach you to the next level.

An argument here would be that not everyone would afford to open their own business, and the above obviously wouldn’t apply to a regular employee, who has to fulfill and perform a job description as it is, whether they like all the tasks in it or not; let’s take a step back here, and recall… what made this person take the decision and accept a job that has several tasks that they despise doing? Was it the pay, the security or simply the “go with the flow”, maybe it was just “running away from a previous job that seemed to be unbearable or a previous horrible boss. This is where I put the focus on the decisions we make, this is what this whole book and methodology is all about, once the driver of our decisions is a negative trigger, we would haphazardly be going from one wrong decision to another, and that would lead us to probably worse scenarios.

I remember here the story of the Lion and the Gazelle, it says:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”

― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run 

One is running to survive, and the other is running for the exact same reason, but one is reactive while the other is proactive.

Explore your innate and acquired talents, what you like to do most, what you enjoy doing, and target your next job, do not work aiming to survive, as Confucius said: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” 

DEAL WITH IT

To improve is to Change, to be Perfect is to change often. Winston Churchill

Change is inevitable, yet, most of the times, change is frustrating; having to leave a school that you know everyone and everything in to join a new one, having to change your laptop, your car, in order to buy a new one, changing work in either a promotion or a quit. With all the progress and light that these changes promise you, the thought of change itself still always holds a considerable amount of discomfort.

As everything we do in patterns result with a habit, flexibility, perhaps the best tool to manage change, is a habit that you can develop by practice. This habit of remaining open-minded and adaptable to new information and situations can make you form a pattern of positive reactions by looking for the opportunity in each “frustrating” and “upsetting” situation, and spotting what’s best for you in it.

Usually, it’s those people who can remain calm and keep their minds functioning consciously in the middle of an unexpected crash or problem that are considered to be superior.

They take a deep breath, relax, and weigh the situation accurately. They keep themselves calm and unemotional by asking questions and seeking information when things don’t work out as they expected.

Ineffective people have a tendency to be in a reactive-responsive mode of behavior much of the time. Instead of consciously and deliberately choosing their courses of action, they react to what is going on around them, and they respond to their emotions, sometimes blowing up and sometimes becoming depressed. They ride an emotional roller coaster. And the very best they can hope for, in this mode of behavior, is to get back to even, where they were before they became upset. The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz.

According to Fritz, the superior person concentrates his attention on his “future vision.” Whenever an unexpected change or setback occurs, the superior person immediately focuses his mind on where he wants to be at a future time. This future vision is something that he has planned and given a lot of thought to, so it is fairly easy to conjure up at a moment’s notice.

When everyone around them are drowning into skeptical investigations about who to blame, and formatting the perfect scenario for the conspiracy that might be tailored for them, Superior people tend to ask, “what do we do now?”, “Where do we go from here?”. They

keep themselves performing at their best by thinking and talking about a desired future

state. Focus your attention on the future, and you can greatly improve your ability to deal with change.

Think about any stressful situation you had in the near or far past, what was mostly the reason you felt frustrated? Most of your stress, sadness, and irritation comes from the fact that you were not in control at that particular moment or situation, or in any particular area of your life; the critical issue in dealing with change is the subject of control.

On the other hand, if you recall the times and places you felt the very best about yourself are those that you were in full control.

Home Sweet home is a perfect example of the above, it is that moment you reach the place where and when you are in full control, especially after a long journey of losing it. When you were outside, you felt you were in lack of control, as if you were moved by external forces, namely traffic, silly drivers, pedestrians, and of course running behind schedule.

Feeling back in control brings comfort and enjoyment, it is like that moment when you have finished an exam, or an assignment, or a project, and you feel like you are back in charge of your life.

 

Ultimately, in order to deal with change, you have to be always in full charge over the things you think about, which should come from your conscious mind since it is the only thing over which you have complete control.

Since change is inevitable and continuous, it is how you think about what is happening to you that is most important in determining how change affects you, and whether you use it to your advantage or let it work to your disadvantage. Brian Tracy

So what type of change do we fear? Is there an exclusive type of change that brings all the discomfort and fearful feelings in us? Indeed, there is; we are always afraid of what we will be worse off as a result, not better off. It is change that implies unpleasant surprises that makes us anxious fearing, here it is the fear of losing control.

In his book “No Excuses”, the legendary Brian Tracy brings to practice a very practical way to face fears, he called it the disaster report, he puts steps into destroying fear almost instantly by first “Defining the worry situation clearly, being completely clear about a situation brings immediate ways of its resolution; Second, Identify the worst possible thing that could possibly happen if the worry situation were to take place. A series of “would you” questions be asked here about losing a job, a relationship or money; after asking such questions, one would find that it’s probably not worth all the worry. The third step is to resolve to accept the worst possible outcome… DEAL WITH IT if it is meant to happen, how would you manage if the worst possible came into reality, putting a solid base of resolutions and contingency plans for it. Finally, Fourth, beginning immediately to improve on the worst, like the old saying, if it ain’t broke, fix it before its broken.

Tracy’s brilliant way of dealing with fear shows that having a purposeful and disciplined action in the direction of your goals is the only cure for fear or worry.  

In this part of the world, change is ongoing, it is like our daily bread an butter, things that are completely out of anyone’s control. In order to manage change, you have to deal with it, put self-direction, write solid and specific goals that enable you to plan for change, plan for instability and control your actions while it happens. We all know that in every situation, some unexpected disappointments and setbacks will happen, this is the nature of the market, and life; sometimes you lose in spite of all the efforts, sometimes unpredictable events puts down all your eagerness and enthusiasm to achieve something, yet, only the superior people know that all these setbacks, disappointments and losses are uncontrollable, are like rain in a sunny day, and reassure their plans constantly with perseverance to fit and use them into their own benefit.

The difference between average and superior is long term planning, so no matter unexpected events happen, they can make some barriers but never drift them from their main concentration, their concrete determination of getting what they want, of reaching the solid goals they have put from the start.

Yes, most goals stay in the level of wishes and dreams, because we don’t take them and ourselves seriously, I bet 90% of the people you know had very good new year’s resolutions, but no one made the effort to write them down, or to ever revisit them again, and eventually they ended up going with the wave of changes, living in anger and worry, loss of control. Dealing with change is as constant as change itself, the moment you surrender to it, it beats you, and we all know we can’t spend our lives crying over spilled milk, unfortunately we do. 

“The last great freedom of man is the freedom to choose his attitude under any given set of circumstances”. Viktor Frankl