Me? Well, I was caught off guard yesterday when I stumbled upon my divorce certificate while hunting for other documents.

Maybe it was because I’d been having such a delicious weekend. On Saturday I’d done a wicked Bodypump class, met up with an old friend and gone window shopping. Sunday morning I’d hung out with Steve drinking coffee, talking shit, and having a laugh. I’d just been saying how happy I was with life right now when it struck.

It wasn’t at all the memory of the divorce itself. At the end of the day that was just a bit of paper that landed through my door one morning without ceremony. No, it was the memory of  the years of empty Sundays that had preceded it.

You may well be thinking that this is not the kind of experience that you’d associate with generally upbeat and positive me? And perhaps that’s all the more reason that I want to share it with you.

See, I’d got married when I was 24, right after my mother died. I’d undoubtedly confused love with needing security, but after the frenzy of organizing the wedding, life began to feel flat. Of course, I was mourning the loss of my mother, but everyone else had moved on, so I imagined I should have too and blamed it on my job at the time. Andrew was also bored, so we hatched a plan to get ourselves “down south” and into more exciting jobs. He ended up getting work near Horsham, where we bought a house: I joined Amex in London and began commuting.

Last week I was writing about stories. The one I’d written for that part of my life was more like a fairy tale. Poor orphan girl is rescued by her knight in shining armor who carries her off to a foreign land where she has a wonderful career, owns a detached house, has two cars on the drive and takes a couple of foreign holidays every year. To the outside that’s probably how it looked. But, as Roxy Music says: “In every dream home, a heartache”.

For a start, Andrew was no prince charming. Far from being my hero, he leached me emotionally and financially. Monday to Friday he was a catering manager. But most weekends, even in the depths of winter – in fact, especially in the depths of winter – he was at some windsuring meet-up in some or other part of the country. I’d tried to join in with that crowd, but it wasn’t my scene. There is nothing more boring than freezing your face off for hours watching small dots on the horizon; or standing in bars all night getting off your head drunk watching men in their twenties and thirties acting like school boys.

So, increasingly I spent my weekends in this odd situation where I was married, but was always alone. From time to time I’d touch my sense of isolation. I’d feel sorry for myself and wonder what I was doing. I’d consider how my reality didn’t fit my fantasy. But for the most part I avoided really looking at it. It was easier to hold things together than to confront things and kick-start a chain of events that might lead to God knew where.

I escaped to work as a way of numbing out

Yesterday as I sat there awash with all those feelings again, and the sadness for myself that I’d had to endure them at all, I asked myself “How? How did I do it? How did I get through these awful days and survive?”

I suppose I’ve known this for some time, but yesterday it came home to me with more felt force. I’d completely numbed myself out on what was happening. And work was the key thing that allowed me to do so. Although it was always a shock to the system when the alarm went off at 6.00 am, Mondays were always a relief. At work I knew who and where I was. I felt confident and capable there. I could throw myself into deep waters with a strong degree of certainty that I’d find my horizons sooner or later. But the same was far from true in my personal life.

It’s ironic that I chose to work in Human Resources. I like to think that I did so from a very caring perspective and that I was a good leader. I certainly had a lovely team of people around me, and some great colleagues; people who felt like family. But there was safety in that too. I could give all of myself Monday to Friday and withdraw on the weekend. At a level, it didn’t have to touch me.

Of course the whole thing fell apart. It was always going to. The first domino went down on discovering that Andrew’s playboy motto – “windsurfers do it standing up” – was now referring to more than just his sailing pursuits. I’ll spare you the detail of the battle for my sanity that went on around all of that for another day. Suffice to say that my corporate career was at its peak as I went through a painful and protracted divorce on grounds of infidelity.

Why am I sharing all of this? What’s its relevance to the blog?

Well, work can play a hugely important role in our lives. When we put who we are to the service of the world the sense of engagement and satisfaction can be enormous. But it’s also possible to use work to vicariously meet needs in us that we’re currently unable to address elsewhere.

I’d love to tell you to stop doing so and to concentrate more on what’s really going on. But I fear that’s coaching bullshit, and that, if you’re pouring yourself unduly into your work, and avoiding your self in the process, it’s because at a level somehow you need to right now. For me, finding my way back to my self was not a decision, but a process that took time. Indeed, it’s one that’s ongoing. Instigating divorce proceedings was only the beginning of me doing my own different kind of work; an inner work that would allow me to resurrect my soul.

And yes, I’ve done a lot to get to the point of having a very rich and happy life. But even now I have days of being drawn down into my feelings and wanting to escape from them. It’s just that, this time I decided to share it.

How about you? How do you use work as a way of escaping from your self? What one small thing can you do today to give your self some space?
photo credit: HikingArtist.com

No related posts.

That stuff that you love doing? The stuff that makes you smile? Can you do more of it and still get paid? This might seem like a really stupid question, especially if the thing you love doing is something like Christine’s eating chocolate cake. How can Christine get paid for eating cake?

My first reaction to El’s challenge was to say, “don’t be ridiculous, eating chocolate cake is my Saturday treat, and what has it got to do with making money?”

But, since I like both chocolate cake and making money, and I’m always up for learning things about myself, even in completely wacky ways, I thought I’d stick with the question and see where it took me.

I don’t actually need much of an excuse to spend time in my local coffee shop but I thought a chocolate cake fieldtrip was called for, so off I headed this morning in search of whatever magic I could find.

Sure enough it came in the form of childhood memories.

It’s probably no surprise to know I loved chocolate anything as a child. My mum was a terrific baker and I ate pretty much everything she produced. Often before it actually made it to the oven.

These were terrific days. When I wasn’t eating, and sometimes even when I was, I was often holed up behind the sofa with pens, papers, crayons, paints, gripped by my creative project of the moment. See, I had the biggest fun as a kid writing stories, and doing all the illustrations for them. Sometimes the stories were serious; sometimes they were satirical and witty. Whatever, I just loved putting stuff together that people would both read and be affected by.

I should have been a writer. That was after all my dream. The child in me had visions of living in a beautiful old cottage, with my dream husband, and a brood of cute kids. When I wasn’t keeping house and feeding my family chocolate cake, I’d be producing block buster books. Stuff that seemed light and frothy on the surface, but captured people’s hearts and so made a difference to their lives.

My father’s death more than took the edge off of things.

But the killer blow was delivered by my guidance teacher who simply sneered as she met with me and my mother to decide what subjects I do for exams.

“Nobody makes money from anything arty in Glasgow, Christine” she said. “You need to focus your efforts on academic subjects and think about a commercial career instead.”

With my dad gone, and us living off my mum’s widow’s pension, what I heard that night, whether it was implied or not, was that I couldn’t do things I loved and make money from them. That I needed to stop thinking like a child and grow up.

I’d always thought that the creative kid had died at that point. But looking back I see that’s not true. What happened was she just got clever and did what she had to do to survive. She took her story in a different direction, and created a new leading role for herself: the business woman. And she played it impeccably. It was what got her through school subjects in which she had no interest; pushed her to do things that felt incongruous; and propelled her to levels she would not otherwise have chosen.

Neither of my parents were around to see me become an HR Director, or to launch my own business. If they had, they’d have been beyond proud. Such achievement was beyond their wildest dreams. So, the career girl certainly did good.

And, make no mistake: it was a part in which I came to feel very at home. It gave me lots of fun challenges, allowed me to meet lots of wonderful people, and enabled me to do lots of international traveling.

But it wasn’t sustainable in the long term.

Curiously when the persona began to crack, and I needed to find out who I was beyond it, how I was going to live and work without it, I intuitively turned to writing as a form of therapy. It allowed me to express myself in ways I may otherwise have not. It was through writing that I could articulate my passion for coaching and counseling, the things I’ve focused on in the last years, that I completely adore and that pay my way in life. But having retrieved the artist in me, I’m not letting her go.

My best writing has always been done in coffee shops, and often with some form of cake or other. Perhaps it’s just the caffeine and sugar buzz. Perhaps too there’s something of the warmth and busyness I find there that invokes happy memories of my family living room and stimulates my creativity.

And, sure, I’m not making money from eating chocolate cake.

But, I am marketing my business almost exclusively through my writing now.

Here’s the big, circle-completing part of the picture, and I only just saw it this way myself. So much of the work I do with clients is about story. When they come to me, although they never use this language, it’s because something of their story doesn’t fit, or is difficult to deal with. They’ve lost their way in the plot. An old script needs to change.  A new storyboard needs creating. Partnering with others as they share their own cliff-hangers, romances and heartaches is privileged creative work indeed. Can you imagine what it feels like to work with someone who becomes truly gripped by your story; who can hold all the sub plots together; who can help you emerge from your own self-created mask and carry your true self forward in life?

Now that I’ve had this massive insight about story, will I do more with it? Will I write more? Will I start producing block busters?

You’ll just have to wait for the next chapter! But meantime I’d love to know in what direction you’d take this story next.

Related posts:

1. Looking At Life Through The Eyes Of A Child
2. Split Work-Life Personality? Join The Club!
3. Deviation From The Norm – My Different Kind Of Work

On top of that, the bogey man of today’s employment market can be the all pervading fear factor, threatening to annihilate you if you dare reassert some control.

Fortunately, there are some simple, yet effective, reframes you can do that allow you to see things in a more self-supporting way.

The following paragraphs give you a step-by-step process to getting your career back on track.

1. Step away from the victim role

   Unfair things shouldn’t happen to good people. But they do.

   I see it all the time at the moment. Talented professionals falling foul of politics around promotion processes; loyal workers expected to put up with unilateral changes to their employment conditions; team stars becoming scapegoats because they chose to speak out against unhealthy dynamics.

   A degree of positive venting about whatever happened is normal and healthy. But guard against ongoing bitching to anyone in your professional network. The sad truth is that it does you more harm than the company that has wronged you.

   You absolutely must decide to take your power back from the situation and move on.

   That mindset switch of itself jolts you from being victim, to being resourceful.

2. Challenge your assumptions about the situation

   A guy I coached recently was distraught when he not only failed a partnership board but was told never to darken its doors again. And, yes, his bosses had been entirely remiss in putting him forward without having supported and mentored him. But he’d naively gone through the process believing he’d get a coveted share in the company purely on merit. He hadn’t considered the need to show an ability to understand company politics, or to have networked with the decision makers ahead of the board.

   Companies are not fair places. They are business institutions, and play by business rules. You are completely dispensable to them, whether they want you to believe that or not.

   Look yourself in the mirror and ask what faulty beliefs you’ve been holding about the situation in which you find yourself. See how hanging onto those assumptions is keeping you stuck. Decide what you need to believe instead.

3. Ask yourself how okay things are for you

   Once you’ve got yourself into a more rational mindset about things, it’s time to confront whether – or not – you’re prepared to accommodate the injustice that’s been served up to you. Instead of imagining that you have to put up and shut up,  see instead the choice you have.

   How okay is it really for you to accept what’s been left with you? If you’re happy to live with the situation – if you can see it opportunity in it and make it work for you – that’s one thing. But, if it has crossed a fundamental boundary for you, you need to acknowledge that to yourself.

   You are not obliged to make yourself crazy trying to justify to yourself that something’s okay when it is not.

4. Explore your move-forward options

   Coming to this choice point has allowed you to get considerable energy back. The next step then is around how you direct that into action that allows you to move on positively.

   What do you want for yourself now? How are you going to achieve that?

   If you’ve decided that for now you’re going to see the lesson in what’s happened and stick around where you are, what’s in that for you? With that in mind, how are you going to re-engage?

   If you’ve chosen that what’s happened is insurmountable, what are you going to do to take yourself positively out of your current situation? What scenarios are open and fruitful that are obvious? What are the more blue sky and out there opportunities that excite you? What small experiments can you make that allow you to test things out while keeping your options open?

Use these four steps to get your passion for your career back on track

There’s no doubting the enthusiasm for work and life you can get from thinking of yourself as a new work pioneer. But sometimes the wheels come off the track. The way back is through seeing the opportunity in the situation using the steps above. Follow them and you’re work life will once more be rocking.

So, where will these steps take you? What has resonated with you most here, and how can you use this thinking to up the ante on your working life?

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Related posts:

1. The Opportunity In The Silence
2. What If There IS No Work?
3. How to stay in your current job AND enjoy it!

Often at work and in life we become so accustomed to living out other people’s expectations of us we spend most of our time on automatic pilot doing task after task without consideration for whether it actually serves us any useful purpose or not.

What do you really, really want?

That’s really the crux of today’s post. Because unless you can answer that question clearly, and put your energy behind achieving it, you’re going to find it difficult to break free from any toxic work practices.

So, the first step of the detox process is to take time to figure out what your own goals are.

Now, I’m not asking you to regurgitate the targets you’ve agreed with your board or senior manager, or the goals you’ve written in your 2010 goal-setting form. They may – or may not – be part of the equation. Rather, I’m challenging you to think about yourself.

Here’s how.

Take half an hour or so – longer if you can – and set your imagination free. In your mind, picture yourself having the working life of your dreams:

• What are you doing?
• Where are you doing it?
• Who is working with you? What role are they playing in your picture?
• When are you doing it?
• How are you doing it?
• What purpose does this work serve in your life?
• How does it reward you?
• What else, other than work, is integral to this picture.
• Who, other than your work colleagues, are important to you in this picture.
• What are you thinking, and how are you feeling about considering your working life in this way?

That’s it for today, folks. The next post, and the next step in the detox process is coming up this Friday. Don’t miss it. Subscribehere for email updates.

If you want any help with this, email me at christine@adifferentkindofwork.com, pick up the phone on +44 (0) 7767 244977, or catch me on Twitter.

Oh, and don’t forget to leave a comment and let me know how you get on!

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox Series

photo credit: TheMarque

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1. How Is Time Spending You?
2. Time Shifting For Success
3. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

Their hearts tell them they’d love to buy in to the New Work Pioneer ethos.

But to a greater or lesser degree the fear of becoming the proverbial bag lady brings them back to doing what they know how to in this situation: get on the market and hustle for another of the same kind of job.

They can pay attention to this “doing what you love” stuff in the future. When things are sorted. When they feel more secure and stable.

You know how it is.

And with more redundancies looming here in the UK, at least in the public sector, even just getting more of the same is not the cakewalk it once was. Here are a few tips for staying street-savvy, without giving your soul over to the whims of the economy.

1. Don’t panic

   Easier to say than to do, perhaps. But, seriously, panic drives you to take action and make decisions that you may regret later. That’s because, when we’re anxious, we’re cut off from the most confident, resourceful parts of ourselves.

   So, first things first, do what you need to in order to nail down key concerns.

   The biggest one is usually money. Face this fear head-on, and early on. Figure out what you need and what you want, budget and keep a tight reign on things. If you need to talk to banks about refinancing or having mortgage payment holidays or whatever, do it proactively.

   Knowing that you’re in control of your money, rather than it being in control of you will give you personal and psychological breathing space.

2. Listen to your heart and your head

   It’s tempting to let your head rule at times when work is tricky. It can definitely help you figure things out and do things cleverly. But it won’t always take account of your intuitions or feelings. They need attention too.

   What do you really, really want to do in this situation? What opportunities do you see that your logical mind wants you to ignore? What does your gut tell you about interviews you’ve gone for, or not? What if you paid attention? Where would that take you?

   Now, how might you use your mind to logic the next steps?

3. Focus on what you can do

   There’s a lot of “can’t” around at the moment. Can’t work. Can’t afford. Can’t progress. What if you shift your attention off of these things and onto where you can direct your energy ?

   Networking is a pretty obvious one. You can do this on or offline. And, since things seem to be changing around you anyway, what do you have to lose by pushing the barriers and experimenting with new networks or new media that you haven’t tried before?

   Updating your skills is another. As, indeed, is taking them in a completely different direction again. Money doesn’t need to be an obstacle. There’s a ton of resource online and either free or relatively inexpensive.

   If you’re looking for a similar job, get yourself the smartest CV and the best support you can buy to position yourself well in a crowded market. Julie Walraven is a fabulous resource on both fronts.

   And if you really do want to use this opportunity for bigger change, find yourself a coach that understands this space and invest in your own transformation.

4. Be pragmatic

   I’m seeing folks take months right now to find work they are happy with. It all depends on what level you’re at, how much you’re earning, and how much networking you’re prepared to do for yourself.

   Meantime, you may still want to put cash in the bank.

   I’m counselling people to take a long term view of things now, separating out what they need to do to earn the money to support themselves, from finding work that they will be happy with ongoing.

   That could look like choosing to take a job that you know is a compromise of some sort for you in the short term, but using it as leverage for future endeavour.

   Or taking interim contracts, if you can find them, to tide you over.

   The trick comes in making these decisions consciously and tactically. You do not need to imagine that a short term solution defines you. It doesn’t. It just keeps your spirit alive in the longer term.

5. Don’t beat yourself up

   Finding paths forward in the current economy is fraught with challenge and set-back. Clients tell me of writing emails for jobs and never getting response. Or, of headhunters who were gushing and warm in getting them to interview never following up with the outcome. It shouldn’t be like this, but sadly, sometimes it is.

   Don’t, whatever you do, take it personally. It’s really not about you.

Times are tough, but keep the faith. Keep your sense of direction and take action you can believe in. That’s what’s going to see you through.

photo credit: Robert S. Donovan

Related posts:

1. The Opportunity In The Silence
2. How to live more easily with the fear of layoff
3. 4 Reframes To Get Your Career Groove Back

As I wrote elsewhere, James has the smartest way of looking at the world of anybody I know. I’ve been paying attention to the things that define him in the hope I can learn a thing or two.

Excitement

The term “zest for life” sounds like a cliché around this wee guy. He whoops and whirls and has this take-your-breath-away enthusiasm for things that’s just so compelling. We’ll be chilling in the garden, or walking along our little countryside pathways, when he’ll spot something. A kite flying directly overhead. A rabbit darting into a hedge. The wild ponies on the hill. His entire being lights up as he sees it and stops in his tracks mesmerised.

His sense of wonder in things is so refreshing.

And it makes me consider how much we take for granted in our adult world. How retrieving a sense of awe would feed the child in us.

Fun

My living room currently resembles an art studio. I’ve got quirky hand drawn posters of my village in one corner and a cast of toys lined up in another. My iPhone, Mac and music library have been commandeered for video making purposes. Not kidding, but this child is teaching me how to use iMovie

He squeals out loud when he finds something funny. There’s no self-judgement or monitoring.

And he causes me to think about how much – or, indeed, how little – we allow ourselves to unreservedly indulge our playfulness. How we sometimes just need to relax and allow a belly-laugh to knock something crazy into shape.

Spontaneity

Can’t do something we imagined we might? No problem for James, there’s always some other exciting possibility of where to direct his attention. Can’t do that walking route you’d mapped out because it’s raining? Let’s make another video, or even go into town and watch Toy Story 3.

“Holidays are for chilling,” he told me the other day as I was obviously getting a little too structured in my planning of things to do. So I backed off and let him chill.

His approach made me reflect on how often, when things don’t work out as we imagined, we get caught up in our disappointment, instead of putting our attention where things can work out for us.

“Are you having fun?” I asked him today.

“Yes,” he said.

“More so than when you’re at school?” I asked. Perhaps I was looking for admiration. Perhaps putting onto him my expectations that school would be boring, holidays not. Whatever, his reply surprised me.

“No,” he said. Huh.

“So, you like school and holidays equally?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re pretty happy with life in general, whatever you’re doing?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“What is it about life that you so enjoy, then?” I said.

He gave this question some serious thought. A flash of inspiration suddenly caught his face.

“Basically, I enjoy anything you can get yourself stuck into,” he said, smiling widely.

Flippin’ ten year old wisdom. You’ve got to love it!

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2. How To Get Paid For Eating Chocolate Cake
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The main aim of doing this challenge is to create a list post that highlights some of the posts in your archives to new readers (a sneeze page), that links out to another blog and that hopefully is a little fun (and not too much work) to do.

A Different Kind of Work just turned a year old, so what a great time to step back and look at things. I’ve really enjoyed putting this post together and would love your feedback on it.

My First Post

A Different Kind Of Blog

Can’t you just feel the euphoria in this post?! I know I certainly do as I read it back and connect with the part of me that had just cracked the technology involved in getting a WordPress blog set up. Now I smile at myself, of course, because it all feels so easy.

The Post I Enjoyed Writing The Most

How To Make Sure You Never Get Ahead

Michael Martine, who was fabulous in helping me get this blog off the tracks initially, told me that he thought I should use my wicked sense of humor on the blog. And so, I channeled it into this post, which I have to say was a complete blast to write.

A Post Which Had Great Discussion

Split Work-Life Personality? Join The Club

This was a fairly open and contentious post in which I shared some of the different bits of my own identity around work, not all of which are an obvious fit with one another by traditional or even logical standards. Lots of people resonated. Others saw professional compromise. All views were welcome.

A Post On Someone Else’s Blog I Wish I’d Written

Is Spiritual Business A Contradiction In Terms?

Written by the amazing Mark Silver this post appeared on Copyblogger. I’ve had the experience for years that a lot of work can be soulless. But how to get the spirit back into it without resorting to new age woo-woo language and completely disenfranchising the mainstream? Mark cracked that question here.

Your Most Helpful Post

10+1 Steps To Make Coaching Work For You

I think lots of people would like to do coaching, but as a client don’t really know how to navigate themselves through it. This post gave pretty concrete advice about being a powerful coaching consumer.

A Post With A Title You’re Proud Of

Unhappy At Work? A Different Look At This Weeks Job Satisfaction Statistics

I like this title because it summed up the post really well. Also, although it was written this January, it still drives most search traffic to the blog.

The Post I Wish More People Had Read

Work Detox: 5 Coaching Questions That’ll Change Your Life

This was one of my earliest posts and, although I’d sharpen up the style significantly now, I thought the content was better than the response indicated. Still, it’s all about learning!

So, some personal reflections and a bit of reading to get to off to a good start this week. Don’t forget to let me know what you think. And if there’s a topic you’d like to see me writing more about, let me know!

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1. A Month of Birthdays

I decided to write this post to share why I think that workshops are such a powerful form of coaching.

Work Life Balance Workshop

I created The Worklife Makeover because everything tells me that “work life balance” is something people are struggling with more and more these days.

Particularly in the current economy where people – assuming they’re working at all – are working harder for the same or less money than before.

Where many things that folks once took for granted about the security of their jobs has disappeared. Including in the relatively more “safe” public sector.

Where business owners are having to really hustle for their livelihoods.

Where expected career paths are evaporating in front of people’s eyes.

Where once certain retirement plans have become unclear.

In corporate speak, while the government plays the game of digging the country out of its black hole of debt, consumer confidence is tanking. And, unsurprisingly, employee engagement measures are hitting the deck.

People are understandably feeling the pressure. Something my good friend Judy Martin wrote about just this week.

Companies are offering their own solutions to these challenges, as Judy clearly points out. But this isn’t universally true.

Besides, I wanted to offer a service, an event, that allows people to look at their lives more broadly than to what extent they help fulfil a corporation’s agenda of them.

I wanted to support people find their own voices, and retrieve a sense of personal power in the chaos that’s going on around us.

Workshops: The Power of the Group

In one to one work, I endorse and support people to find their own path.

But with certain topics, getting a small group of kindred spirits together has enormous value of its own. People, who don’t know each other from Adam in the beginning, meet around a shared concern, and become one another’s sounding boards.

Of course it takes strong facilitation and coaching to quickly create the safety that allows people to share. And highly focused content and coaching exercises to help people hone in on what’s right for them.

But beyond that, as I help people rethink their lives, see new possibilities, and shift old mindsets that keep them stuck, the power of the group plays a role too.

It mirrors back to you who you really are. It witnesses your casting off of stuff that no longer suits you. It amplifies for you the positive decisions you make in going forward in your life.

Workshops: You are not alone

With skilful leadership, the group develops its own energy. People come to understand that they are not alone in things. A community emerges that supports itself.

Often, that community extends beyond the workshop in ways of its own. I just have to watch my Twitter feed these days to see the interconnections that go on between the online folks who attended my last workshop, and that’s not to mention some of the off-line stuff I am part of too.

So, don’t underestimate workshops. Well run, they can be transformational.

What workshops have you attended, or indeed run, where the power of the event and the group rocked your life?

Related posts:

1. Who Else Wants A Free Worklife Makeover?
2. New Work Pioneers Use Crises As Opportunities For Change
3. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer

How sad is that?

Still, it echoes a lot of what I hear and see around me: people completely frazzled ahead of the school holidays, bouyed up by the prospect of a couple of weeks in the sun and putting off any big decisions about life till the autumn.

photo credit: beamillion

All of which has got me thinking about what that says about how much – or rather, how little – we value ourselves and our lives.

How we tend to see work and holidays in a very black and white, all and nothing kind of way.

The extent to which we adapt ourselves to fit our society in ways that don’t suit us.

And how it might be if we took holidays, less as a recovery from some punishing schedule, and more as a welcome pause to refresh and recharge our generally happy existences?

In my coaching work, people learn to free themselves from the tyranny of loving only to hate their work. They come to understand the interconnections of their work as an aspect of their whole lives. They begin to find their own way of being in a society that would prefer them to conform. To live authentic lives and to feel the sense of peace and happiness that brings. In that scenario, they’ll find their own rhythm about what effort versus what rest they need and what that looks like. Whether they take rest in big blocks, or they weave it into their daily lives. How time off feeds them and how they can hold on to its nourishment when they resume their endeavours.

They take lovely holiday, for sure. But they rarely need them.

And, yes, it’s hard work to get to this place, but breaking out of the vicious cycle of work and holidays is entirely possible.

What about you? What do holidays mean in your life? What single thing could you do differently that would allow the benefit of holidays to have a more lasting effect for you?

Related posts:

1. Looking At Life Through The Eyes Of A Child
2. How To Get Paid For Eating Chocolate Cake
3. Who Else Wants A Free Worklife Makeover?

One thing which I find amusing is how most people expect to get out of the ordinary success and satisfaction in their careers, without doing or being themselves out of the ordinary. They hope that just working hard will be enough.

The world of work is in my perspective filled with people who are walking clichés. They dress like everyone else, they act by the same rules and they say the same things in only slightly different words. When you suggest to them doing, thinking or saying something which is beyond the conventional, they pin you to the wall for being inappropriate or breaking the norms.

Differentiation is the key

Being different in the workplace seems to be a misunderstood factor. Being different is not the same as being competent. And competence is also an important factor for a great career. But it is not enough. Differentiation is what allows you to make the best use of competence.

Differentiation is like a bridge which creates the proper context for your work to reach the right target. When instead of being a cliché, you are different, this allows you to stand out. And when you stand out, three essential things happen:

1. You get noticed;
2. You get remembered;
3. People get curious about you.

And from there, all sorts of great things can happen in your career, which the conventional worker or businessman rarely sees happening. I believe that most people need conscious practice and guidance to learn how do differentiate themselves and stand out. So, here are my main points for not being a cliché:

1. Understand your uniqueness. Differentiation starts with knowing yourself and especially what makes you unique. It’s much harder to stand out if you don’t have a good idea what are the ways that you specifically can stand out. Take some time to really get to know yourself and to answer questions like:
   • What are my unique strengths?
   • What values that I believe in make me stand out?
   • What is unconventional about the way I live my life?
2. Dress with attitude. The first impression you create is by the way you look. And this is your first chance to differentiate yourself. Move away from the conventional business uniform and add something unique to it, which makes you stand out visually from the crowd. For example, I will usually wear a business suit, which is conventional, but it will have a light color and I will not wear a tie, which is unconventional and allows me to stand out the moment you see me.
3. Talk spontaneously. A common pattern for people in the workplace is to think too much before they say anything, and make sure what comes out of their mouth is always safe, is always the right thing. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for never standing out. Give yourself permission to be spontaneous when you talk at least to some extent, and you will express more of those thoughts which make you unique, in your unique way.
4. Express the divergent opinions. In particular, one thing most people will avoid expressing at work is those opinions which are different from the opinions of other people. They are afraid to upset someone, to take risks. It’s one of those things you will need to push through. Divergent opinions are one of the critical ways to differentiate yourself, and it’s essential to put a lot of them on the table.

Ultimately, in my perspective, differentiation is about understanding that deep inside, you are a unique person who naturally stands out. Your task is to let that uniqueness out in everything: what you say, what you do, how you look, how you live. This is the key to getting ahead by not being a cliché.

Eduard Ezeanu is a communication coach with an attitude-based approach. He helps others to improve people skills they find relevant and get top notch results. He also writes on his blog, People Skills Decoded.

photo credit: cookipediachef

Related posts:

1. Deviation From The Norm – My Different Kind Of Work
2. Paving Your Own Path