The Detox In Brief

Here’s the journey we’ve been on that’s helping you get a grip on things:

• First, Set Yourself Goals gave you an exercise to help you get clear about what you really, really want from life.
• The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus challenged you to consider the key things you ought to be concentrating on if you’re serious about getting off the hamster wheel.
• How Is Time Spending You? got you confronting the realities of how you’re actually spending your energies right now. And,
• Time Shifting For Success had you figuring the difference between what you say you want and what you’re currently doing. And zeroing in on what really needs to change.

So, you’ve got lots of things that you’ve begun to put into action. But how do you keep up and build on your own momentum?

What Gets Focus Gets Results

The organising power of the brain is immense. Give something enough thought and attention and you’ll bring it to life. Consider this: all of the best works, be they artistic or entrepreneurial, began as ideas in someone’s head. It just so happens that their creators dared to put the energy and focus into manifesting them.

Those goals and plans you’ve just spent the last two weeks hatching now need similar commitment and belief from you. They need to be nurtured. They need you to have an active system of planning, doing and reviewing that turns them into hardcore reality.

Today’s challenge is for you to decide how to do just that.

What works for me is to hand write my goals in a beautiful notebook and review them regularly. 5 minutes a day is all it takes. I’ve got a routine of taking myself to my local coffee shop, treating myself to a good strong coffee, and checking in on myself. Every day, I figure out one or two key things that, if I do them, are going to help me progress my life plans.

Morning coffee might not be your cup of tea, if you’ll excuse the pun. But find your own routine. Your own positive habit that’s going to make an ongoing difference. And don’t just take my word for it that this kind of process works. Check out fellow blogger Karen Ruby’s view on it too.

Whatever works.

The point is to bring what you want to the forefront of your mind even if briefly every day. And if you can build in a longer weekly or monthly review so much the better. If that feels like a chore, find ways to put fun into the equation. Go somewhere quirky to think and write. Use funky pens or your favourite note-making tools. Put your favourite music on and rock it.

Make the decision to do it, and watch day by day as your life and work change.

So, that’s the end of the series, folks. Thanks for being here with me. I look forward to hearing how things are changing for you!

Related posts:

1. Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox Series
2. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus
3. How Is Time Spending You?

In fact, if you take a look at the ideal week you created in the third post, with the 24 hour snapshot you made in the fourth, chances are you see quite a mismatch.

So, today your answers to three questions will help you zero in on what really needs to change.

What needs to stay in your life?

What’s already good that just needs to remain as is? Remember that change doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bath water.

What needs to go?

What are all the things you’re doing that have reached their sell-by date? What are the attitudes you’re holding onto, implicit in what you’re currently focusing on, that need to be ditched?

What one thing can you do right now to begin the process of moving away from these things?

What needs to be added to your life?

What’s missing that you need to start doing? How are you going to add these things? What’s the action you can take right now, today, that will get the ball rolling on this?

As you work through all three questions, think too about who can help you, and what resources you can lean on.

So, off you go and make some changes, not forgetting of course to share some of your decisions and insights with me.

Join me again on Friday, for a wrap-up discussion talking about how you keep your good intentions alive over the longer term. If you want to be sure not to miss it, sign up here to get it by email!

Earlier posts in the series

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox

First, Set Yourself Goals

The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

How Is Time Spending You?

photo credit: nnes

Related posts:

1. First, Set Yourself Goals
2. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus
3. How Is Time Spending You?

But what are you currently focussing on?

You’ll get the answer to this question by looking at how you’re spending your time. Bottom line, if you’ve been feeling that work and life need a bit of a sort out, the chances are there’s a mismatch between what you should be focused on, and what you’re actually doing.

I take some of my coaching clients through this process in detail, and the occasional one says, “yes, but there are lots of things I have to do.” The thing is we don’t have to do anything. You may imagine that you have little choice about how you spend your time. That, my friend, is mistake number one. That, indeed, is allowing time to spend you. It’s giving over your focus to things that are not in keeping with who you are and what you say you want.

We’ll get into more detail about the whole mismatch thing in the next post.

But today’s exercise is all about getting to grips with what an average day in your life actually looks like.

A Day In The Life Of…

Over the next 24 hour, what I’d like you do, is step back and review your moment by moment activities. Set a half-hourly, recurring alarm using the timer on your computer, phone, watch or whatever. And when the buzzer goes, make a note of just how you’ve spent the last 30 minutes.

No need to analyse. No need to change what you do. Just observe and make notes.

Bring them back here on Wednesday, ready for the next stage in the process. If you want to be sure not to miss it, sign up here to get it by email!

What occurs to you as you set yourself the task of doing this exercise?

Earlier posts from the series:

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox

First, Set Yourself Goals

The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

photo credit: Robert von Bangert

Related posts:

1. Time Shifting For Success
2. How To Maintain Your Work Detox In 5 Minutes A Day
3. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

You may have noticed, as a few of the commentors did, that the questions around goals in the last post were deliberately open. They did not ask you to focus on your current job or your status quo life. They may have taken you, to use Marion Anderson’s words, into the realms on “how else…?” or “what else…?”  That’s fine.

If they didn’t it’s time to go back to your answers to those original questions and challenge yourself. Are you really stepping up to your own plate in the way you’ve approached them?

Off you go and check. I’ll be right here when you’re ready.

Ready?

Today’s key takeaway point

Goals only get realised when you decide you’re going to achieve them, and then put your focus and energy behind doing just that.

It’s that simple. If you say you want something, but you do something else, you’ll get something else. In which case you haven’t got goals, you’ve got fantasies.

Exercise

So, what are the things you must do to enable you to achieve your goals? Start off with a list, or a mindmap, or whatever works for you when you’re thinking freely. Then look at your list, and figure out the few things that, if you gave them all your attention, would really allow you to motor.

Then

What proportion of your time would you ideally need to spend on these things to see them gain traction?

Note, I’m not asking you to think about what proportion of your available time after you’ve done your job and all your other chores. I’m asking, blank sheet of paper, if you were reinventing your life – because, in a way, you really are – how much time do your key activities deserve?

Draw yourself a blank grid of seven days and map it out. Or, better still, download my Ideal Week pdf and use it.

Create your ideal week, step back and feel how good it is to see your life mapped out in front of you, full of the things you really want to be doing.

This is the blueprint you need to take your work detox to the next level on Monday. Meantime, have a great weekend and don’t forget to let me know how it’s all shaping up for you!

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox Series

First, Set Yourself Goals

photo credit: Dominic Sayers

Related posts:

1. How Is Time Spending You?
2. First, Set Yourself Goals
3. Time Shifting For Success

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

Related posts:

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

The problem is that, unless you do something fundamental to change your status quo, the feel good factor from your expensive break will last about two days.

Then you’re once more back on the hamster wheel, living only for your next break.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Welcome to The Two-Week Work Detox, a series of six articles coming to you over the next couple of weeks. It’s going to work like this:

• Each post will have a brief but chunky bit of content, followed by self-coach homework and/or questions.
• You’ll need something to capture your thoughts, ideas, and actions in. A funky notebook, a Moleskin, your iPad, laptop, or voice-recorder. Whatever works for you really.
• Tune in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for each update. Better still, make sure you’re subscribed to the blog to get each new post via email.
• Bring your courage, enthusiasm and determination to kick your work-life in the ass.

Sound good?

So, before we get started with the series, I’d love to hear what aspects of your working life you’d like to change? And how can this series help you achieve that?

photo credit: coolinsights

Related posts:

1. How To Maintain Your Work Detox In 5 Minutes A Day
2. First, Set Yourself Goals
3. How Is Time Spending You?

Today I’m delighted to welcome the super-talented Tara Sophia Mohr. Her beautiful piece challenges us to consider what our real work is – and how we can do it, irrespective of what job we might currently be doing.

Work Worthy of You

There you are. You. A sacred human being, with your particular form of brilliance. It may be a form of brilliance that school teachers knew how to recognize, and they at school could assess, but probably not. It may be a form of brilliance that your parents saw and spoke to you about, probably not. But don’t be confused, your unique brilliance resides within you, and the world needs it.

Then there is your heart, your desire to create something of value, something that heals or enriches or improves the world. There is your desire to be part of something good, something ethical, something meaningful.

Work can be about all of this. Work can be the experience that uses your gifts and fulfills your desire for contribution. Work can be the ultimate expression of what you came here, to this planet, to do. Work can be worthy of the sacredness of you.

The Mind Baggage

Here comes the mind-baggage, the voice that rushes in to say, “but I could never make a living doing something that I love.” The belief that you could never be more than an easily exchangeable part in the vast economic machine. There are all the fears – of failing if you go your own way, of what other people will think, of the risks of dropping out of the mainstream way. There is the fear of ending up starving on the street.

It is up to each of us to question these fears – are they true? Are they guiding you in a wise way? Do they reflect a realistic assessment of risk? Are they voices of reason, or simply voices of fear?

If you set all those fears aside, place them outside the chamber of your thinking, what do you see now, about what you want? What do you see now about what is possible?

Your Job vs. Your Real Work

In my work with coaching clients, we make a distinction between their jobs and their real work. Their jobs are whatever they are doing to earn income at the moment.

Their real work is what they feel called to do, the work that feels right in the soul. It’s the work that ignites their passion and releases the adrenalin in their veins. It’s the work that makes life feel more alive and colorful, yet more calm and balanced, all at the same time. It’s the work that makes them feel stronger, that makes them feel like themselves.

I stand for this: everyone can do their real work – no matter what their job at the moment. Everyone has the opportunity to begin doing their real work – in some way – no matter what their external circumstances — financial constraints, family responsibilities, lack of time.

If your real work is protecting the environment and your job is trading stocks, you can do your real work through volunteering, political action, and philanthropy. If your real work is teaching music and your job is web design, you can teach music to a person in your community, once a week.

It’s the self-sabotaging voice within us that makes it either-or, black and white. That part of us loves the melodramatic idea that you had to give up your passion long ago, that there is just no way to keep it alive now that you have a mortgage, family, demanding job…you fill in the blank. That part of us sees us as stuck, powerless victims when it comes to creating fulfilling work.

Why? Because doing our real work is scary. It’s real. It’s emotional. It’s vulnerable. It evokes to fear to start claiming our real lives, to start living more authentically, so a part of us tries to keep us safe in the known status-quo.

But you are bigger than that, and smarter than that, so notice the fear, notice the resistance, and start doing your real work, in some manageable, doable way.

You’ll find that the joy and energy you get from doing your real work is so big and rich and powerful that even small amounts of time spent on it will change your life.

Create the Relationship Between Your Job and Your Real Work

As you do your real work more and more, you get to decide: what do you want the relationship between your job and your real work to be? They can be one and the same: you can make your real work also the thing you do for income. Or they can remain separate. Or they can overlap somewhat, but not entirely. You get to decide.

At different stages of our lives, and based on our different personalities and needs, different solutions work. For example, Carol’s real work is helping struggling youth, and she thinks one day, maybe after her kids have left the nest, she’d like her job to be in that field. For now, she really appreciates a less demanding, moderately fulfilling job that allows her flexibility and lots of time with her family. For the time being, she works with youth organizations as a volunteer and board member, and she loves it. Mark, another client, recently decided that it just wasn’t fulfilling enough for him to keep his job and his real work separate. He made a major career change and started a finance business run in a socially responsible way, pursuing his real work calling.

You get to decide what you want the relationship between your job and your real work to be, but there is no excuse for turning your back on your real work.

Your real work will reduce stress and resentment and pessimism in you, and it will bring more humor, lightness of spirit, and emotional balance into your life. It will bring more meaning and vitality into your daily existence. And it will give the world what the world is so thirsty for – human beings showing up in their full vitality to contribute for the good.

Tara Sophia Mohr is a writer, coach, and personal growth teacher. She writes the blog Wise Living. You can receive her free Goals Guide, “Turning Your Goals Upside Down and Inside Out (To Get What You Really Want)” by clicking here.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Related posts:

1. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer
2. Here’s How New Work Pioneers Navigate Their Journey
3. Deviation From The Norm – My Different Kind Of Work

They spend years, not to mention thousands of pounds, on the next book, coach or workshop that offers the key to the holy grail.

Meantime they feel pretty miserable doing whatever it is they’re doing – or not – right now. And beat themselves up for being a lesser person because, unlike the zealous peddlars of the vocation myth, they haven’t found what work it is they’re really supposed to be doing.

Experiments

In working with clients having this experience, I encourage them to take all that forward-looking pressure off themselves and live in the present.

What if they could allow themselves to find something meaningful in what they’re doing right now?

What if they saw their current work or lack of it as an experiment, telling them something about themselves, their lives, and what they most enjoy?

What would they discover? How could they use that learning to course-correct their current situation, or future work decisions?

Not one calling but several

In my client work, as in my own life, I see time and time again how what we do shifts and morphs over time. The picture of vocation as a static, certain thing into which we can plough ourselves for endless years is misguided.

Sure, some people know early on that they’re called to be a doctor or singer or lawyer or whatever.

But for others it’s a discovery process of finding one jigsaw puzzle piece of ourselves after another in the different things we do. Without valuing the purpose of the bit we’re doing right now, we’ll never get to understand the full picture.

Implications

If you’re someone searching for your one big calling, I encourage you to sit and think about this today:

How might you be diminishing yourself by constantly yearning after some other thing than what’s right in front of you?

I’m not saying that there’s not something bigger waiting for you.

What I am saying is that, if you put yourself back into the flow of what you’re doing right now, you’re more likely to find it more quickly and more powerfully.

What do you think?

photo credit: alicepopkorn

Related posts:

1. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer
2. Doing Your Real Work
3. Split Work-Life Personality? Join The Club!

Monday morning. How did it feel to get out of bed and anticipate another week?

Much of your answer will depend on how you choose to see the work you do.

Job

If you see your work as a job, you consider it primarily as something you do for money. That’s not to say that, at a level, you don’t enjoy it or don’t get along with some of your colleagues. But the chances are you have little real engagement to it.

What’s important is that you earn the money you need to finance your life.

When this job is done, you’ll hope to get another of the same. You live for the weekend, for holidays and to retire.

Career

Having a career means that somewhere along the way – at school, or university perhaps – you hit on a chosen field within which you wanted to work. A profession maybe like accountancy, or law. Or teaching, or science, or medicine, or business management.

Whatever, study and training have probably been an aspect of your journey to date. Progression is important; there’s a strong sense of the career ladder and you want to get as high up it as you can. In fact, a lot of your motivation is about getting more or better, whether that’s in the shape of salary or benefits or any of the other outward trappings of career success.

When your current position comes to an end, you’ll want a move that signifies progression or at least one that you can position as such on your CV.

Calling

When what you do for a living feels like a calling to you, work is its own reward. You turn up and do what you do because you love it. It means something to you beyond the here and now.

You bring something of yourself to the world, and the world needs it. Whether that’s your entrepreneurialism, or your unique writing voice; whether you’re finding the antidote for a serious disease or are developing the prototype for a new invention. Whatever, how you choose to do it will be pretty unique to you.

Sure, you want to be paid for your work, but that’s an outcome; a consequence. The primary thing is the work itself. In fact, you enjoy what you do so much and it’s such a part of you that the idea of retiring seems a bit strange to you.

So, Monday mornings, like any other mornings are other exciting days to work on your thing.

So, which is yours: Job, Career, or Calling?

No related posts.

This is the sixth in The New Work Pioneer Manifesto series. Today we’re talking about the landmark stages navigated on the way to work life freedom.

Many coaches sell seminars and bootcamps where they promise transformational life change for a couple of hundred quid in a weekend.

I’ve often wondered what hopeful planet they live on, because my years of experience of helping people radically change their lives tell me that work life change is not a one off event.

It’s a process. And indeed it needs to be.

The good news, however, is that, although everyone’s journey to living and working on their own terms is unique, there are some typical milestones along the way.

The prompt

The whole thing kicks off when something within us or beyond us causes us to consider that how we’re living and working right now needs to be different. The desire for change can arise by itself, often from a sense of boredom, dissatisfaction, or lack of fulfilment in what we’ve been doing. An inner feeling that there needs to be more. Or that we could be more.

Or, it can come from outside of us, propelled by some force for good or for bad. The arrival of a baby unexpectedly resetting our expectations of what we want from work. The economic downturn resulting in us losing our job or our business, forcing us to question what we really do want from work and from life.

Or a serendipitous happening causing fate to offer us a possibility for change of which we may only have dreamt. A conversation offering freelance work, when we’ve been toying with how to broker an exit from salaried employment.

The prompt needs you to listen, and to not discount it.

Accepting the call

Even if the prompt has come from an exciting life event like a new relationship, or a move to our dream home, it’s often met with uncertainty. We are moving into uncharted territory, and the losing of control that’s associated with letting go of the shore of our existing world view can be as frightening as it is thrilling.

We need, however, to accept the call for change or risk stagnating.

Accepting the call needs you to see the rich choice you have and to make a conscious commitment to moving forward.

Frustration

Assuming we’ve decided that we’re up for change, the next milestone we tend to confront is frustration.

As we change our way of life and work, we’re fundamentally changing our way of being.

It’s unusual to have reached this stage and not to have learned significant new things about ourselves, and our self-awareness begins to shift and open.

Old ways of thinking and behaving feel outgrown. Still, we haven’t yet inhabited what’s right now.

I think of a top lawyer client whose single status had enabled her total dedication to an enormous portfolio and workload. But mid-thirties, a ticking biological clock awakened her desire for relationship and children. Allowing herself this was the first step. Adopting the mindset, skills and behaviour of one who would have a different kind of success took time.

Frustration requires your patience. It needs you to honour the deep learning that you’re doing; to trust that profound life change is afoot.

Stuckness

Many people reach a point where there’s just so much change going on for them, and it’s so unfamiliar, that they feel out of their depth with it all.

You know you’re here when you find yourself asking, “what on earth have I done?” Or, “what have I let myself in for?”

It’s not unusual at this stage to simply feel lost.

One of my friends had been the proverbial “yes” person at work and, having become completely fed up with always being dumped on, decided that she wanted her life back. But, being more assertive with her boss and colleagues didn’t initially go down well. In fact, for a few months, she sat in a frosty environment at work, being berated for daring to say “no” to things. She’d call me in tears about how bad this felt. Still, she couldn’t see how to change it. On the one hand, she could not go back to being a dogsbody. On the other, she didn’t yet have skills in her behavioural vocabulary that allowed her to break out feeling so bad.

Stuckness needs your empathy and understanding. It needs you to constantly remind yourself of your vision and of all the positive reasons you decided to take a different path.

Experimenting

Stuckness is dissolved when you start trying new ways through things.

Typically you get so annoyed with feeling that things aren’t coming together that you explore new different possibilities.

The lawyer moved to this stage when she joined an online dating agency and began putting drinks and dinner dates in her diary. These prompted her to consider new possibilities around how she would focus her work time, and what standards she would be comfortable to set for herself now.

My friend got here when she became so pissed off with her colleagues whinging that she shifted her mindset to seeing that what they thought of her wasn’t her problem. This freed her energy to focus more on proving to them that she could deliver even better results by honouring her own values.

Playfulness is an important factor to experimenting; testing things out without needing them to deliver any particular outcome.

Integration

Finally, the things you’ve been trying out and adopting as new become your norm. They begin to feel natural to you. Indeed, they are “you”.

You can look back and see that you’ve negotiated a big change in yourself. And that it has been for the good.

Integration requires acknowledgement, gratitude and celebration.

Interestingly, as much as that integration is the ending of one major round of change, its also the beginning of another. Next time around, the call will be different, as will the lessons you’ll learn and the integrations you’ll make. But with every round of change come new insights, and new shifts in your growth and development.

Which just adds to the magic of the whole thing!

But what’s your experience? I’d really like to hear. Do you recognise these big milestones? Where are you in your journey? What have you accomplished, and what’s yet to come?

Next Friday, we wrap the series up, talking about the tools New Work Pioneers uniquely use to fuel their success. Make sure you don’t miss out! Subscribe here..

Related posts:

1. Here’s How New Work Pioneers Navigate Their Journey
2. New Work Pioneers Use Crises As Opportunities For Change
3. Split Work-Life Personality? Join The Club!