Integrating personal and career success

July 26, 2017November 30, 2023 Edward Chalk

Integrating personal and career success

Getting a job and earning money do not always guarantee that you will enjoy a life of satisfaction and happiness.

‘The paradox of prosperity’ (1999), a paper prepared for the Salvation Army by the Henley Centre, argues that although material prosperity is increasing in western society, the chances of a fulfilling life are decreasing. By 2010 more people will experience life stress, fewer people will find satisfying relationships, fewer people will feel secure and ‘safe’ and fewer people will be able to meet the conditions for self-actualisation.

BTEC National Health Studies, page 302

https://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=0435455192

This is odd, as it would seem that if you are financially successful and earning money that you can spend on the things that are important to you, then your earning power will automatically strengthen your personal life. Are career involvement and success in your personal life fundamentally incompatible, or is it just a question of finding the right balance?

High-energy and low-energy states

The way that we feel and think at home is very different to the way that we feel and think at work. At home we are in a relaxed, low energy mode. Our office mindset, on the other hand, is high energy and focussed. Over the course of 24 hours, we oscillate from our serene low-energy home mindset to the high-energy office mentality, and then back to our low-energy state when we go home.

The journey to work is not only a physical transportation, but also a psychological transformation from the home persona to the work persona. In her book Home and Work (1996), Christena Nippert-Eng described how people go through a set of rituals to move from their home mentality to their work mentality. The separation between home and workplace is not just a spatial one; the two environments correspond to two social identities. Nippert-Eng’s respondents had elaborate techniques and habits to shed their home mentality in the work and get into the work mentality, and then leave the professional mode behind them in the evening to resume their private persona at home. These practices could be as simple as putting on specific clothes for each environment, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee or having beer at the end of the day.

Digital Anthropology, edited by Heather A. Horst, Daniel Miller, page 133
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0857852922

This constant change is healthy and refreshing. On the way to work we psyche ourselves up into the high-energy office mentality. When we get back home, we unwind, tell over amusing anecdotes from the workplace and laugh at office frustrations. Our down time at home rejuvenates us for another day on the office and our energetic work life provides the impetus for us to progress with our personal lives.

Is there something that can disrupt this healthy cycle; so we become unable to bring our relaxed home mood to the office, or we become unable to bring our work energy back home?

Uneven energy

By nature, we are complex beings and display the different facets of our personalities in different situations. For example, sometimes we enjoy having fun, sometimes we engage in intellectually stimulating activities and sometimes we enjoy providing guidance to others and helping people out.

All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts

As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII – William Shakespeare

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/you-it-act-ii-scene-vii-all-worlds-stage

However, the high energy attitude we assume at work may positively exclude us from involving all aspects of our personalities in our jobs. For example:

The manager who is trying to explain his point of view at a board meeting is probably not thinking about finding oneness with nature.

The share trader who is trying to determine the market direction is probably not thinking about playing with their kids.

The tour guide who is happily displaying local history is probably not thinking about how they will pay off their mortgage.

Subsequently, in the course of going about our work, we may encounter the following circumstances.

Our job only involves specific aspects of our personalities.

and

We move into a high-energy frame of mind in order to meet the challenges of doing our jobs.

so that

We become unevenly energised; the parts of our personalities that we activate at work, become stronger. But the parts of our personalities that we do not need at work, are forgotten and left behind.

Becoming trapped in your work mindset

The healthy oscillation between your low-energy home mindset and your high-energy frame of mind, depends on your ability to reset back to your old, natural self, when you go back home.

However, if only one aspect of your personality is involved in your work, then work pressures may push you to consistently think and feel in a particular way.

If this happens, then even when you go home to relax, your thoughts and feelings will tend to follow along the same lines that you are used to at work. Subsequently, you will be unable to escape from your work mentality, as your personality will start to become centred around the feelings and thoughts that you experience at work.

Conclusion

Due to the increasing role specialisation of the modern workplace, it is likely that your job will place pressure on you to adopt a particular attitude and act in a particular way at work. However, this does not necessarily mean that you want to become “that type of person”.

If you are objectively aware of the persona that you project at work, you will be able to ensure that when you return home, you can take off the “work clothes” that you wore during the day, and reset to your simple, natural self.

Why do I hate my job? – Looking for variety in your life

March 19, 2017March 20, 2017 Edward Chalk

Why do I hate my job?

According to Google, “Why do I hate my job?” is a question that is being asked pretty often.

Google search - Why do I hate my job

Obviously though, you would not take have taken your job initially unless you thought you were going to like it.

What changes between the initial thrill of getting a job and the conclusion that you have emotionally parted company with your former dream?

Buffy : An Adventure Story by Bob Graham

Bob Graham describes one of the reasons people feel their job is not a good fit in a poignant children’s book about a multi-talented dog called Buffy.

Buffy - An adventure story

To cut a short story even shorter, the plot of the book goes like this:

Buffy is a stage assistant to Brillo the magician, however Brillo finds that the audience cheers louder for Buffy than for himself, so he fires Buffy.

“OUT! and never come back,” cried Brillo.

With his last coins, Buffy buys a tin of dog food and a tin opener in a supermarket and then jumps aboard a moving freight train heading out into the countryside.

And while he slept, the train continued its rhythm:
OUT, OUT…
and never come back.
OUT, OUT…
and never come back.

In the morning, Buffy jumps off the train and then goes to try and find a job, however no-one will give Buffy a job because he does not fit into a slot.

Nobody wanted a dancing sheep dog.
Nobody wanted a tiny rope-throwing cattle dog.
Nobody wanted a plate-juggling kitchen dog.
Nobody wanted a guard dog who played the harmonica.

Eventually Buffy stops in front of a statue, the words on which read “I am me. No more. No less”. Buffy decides that since he does not fit into a “job slot”, the world will have to accept him for who he is.

“Then one day Buffy stopped. He put down his bag, wiped his brow and looked around him.
“I can go no further,” he said.
“I’m not a sheep dog, a cattle dog, a kitchen dog or a guard dog. So what sort of dog am I?”
“I am Buffy! And I will do what I do. And this time, the world shall come to me.”

The world shall come to me

Buffy starts busking, and meets Mary Kelly and the musical Kelly family, who acknowledge his unique talents and adopt him.

Now, each night after dinner, the music starts and each night the floorboards shake. Mary’s and Buffy’s feet beat to the rhythm of the jigs and the reels.
And Buffy lives up there, on the hill, to this day.

Mary Kelly and Buffy

“Filling a role” versus “Who you are”

As Buffy found out, every job requires a very specific skill set to be applied predictably day after day.

Furthermore, the larger a company is, the more precise each process has to be. Every employee has to become expert in the role and responsibility that has been assigned to them, in order that their function will fit into the operations of the company as a whole. This sort of employment does not leave you with a lot of leeway to develop your personality or to apply the multitude of skills that you were born with.

Subsequently, the answer to “Why do I hate my job?”, is probably because the job is not you!

You are multi-talented – but your job requires that you focus and refine one specific skill.
You are innovative – but your job requires that you do exactly the same thing every day
You like relating to people in different ways – but your job requires that you should always be predictable.

Thinking out of the square

It is perfectly possible, that you will not find a job on a job board that will resonate with the unique skills and the unique personality that identify who you really are. Because of this, some people are leaving standard careers to look for greater versatility.

Rather than define their lives and self-worth in terms of a preordained, often constraining, career track, workers are creating their own patchworks of job experiences to suit their lives.

The Opt-out Revolt: Why People Are Leaving Companies to Create Kaleidoscope Careers

It is also possible, however, that the risks of breaking with a standard career path do not fit the predictable life that you would really like to have. If so, how can you both find predictability at work, but also fulfillment in your life?

According to the Harvard Business Review, the answer is; “If you want to be happy at work, have a life outside it.”

The bottom line: Satisfaction at work is influenced by factors such as benefits, pay, relationships, and commute length. But all of this boils down to two things being important, regardless of your circumstances: (1) having a life outside of work, and (2) having the money to afford it. If you have a job that grants you both of these, you might be happier than you realize.

https://hbr.org/2017/03/if-you-want-to-be-happy-at-work-have-a-life-outside-of-it

If you do have a life outside of work, you will be able to develop and apply the parts of your personality and skills that are not relevant in your job. Leading a full life will enable you to reap the benefits of being happy at work together with financial stability in your non-working life.

The Kelly family

What is the importance of personal growth and development?

February 23, 2017September 11, 2017 Edward Chalk 1 Comment

What is the importance of personal growth and development?

If you google “What is personal growth”, you will get the following search result:

In fact, though, it is unlikely that personal growth has anything to do with reaching your goals by maximizing your potential. This is equivalent to saying, “To make this rose more beautiful, let me find out what I can use it for.”

When we look at somebody and say, “That is a wonderful person,” what we are seeing is a person who has gone through a process of personal growth that makes their personality shine. This person has become a beam of sunlight to the people around them. We are not looking at somebody who has optimized the functional aspect of their existence.

True personal growth does not depend on external circumstances. Getting ahead in your career, making money, succeeding in sports and gaining academic qualifications all depend on external circumstances that are not in your ability to control. The athletic and academic abilities that you were born with and the earning capacity you have access to are external to your inner personality.

How can we grow and become beautiful human beings that other people will look to for cues on setting their own emotional clock?

Here are 10 personal growth strategies that depend simply and purely on your willpower to become a greater person.

Autonomy

It is only possible for you to experience personal growth if you are your own person. Don’t be swept along with other people’s ideas and feelings. Come to our own conclusions about the way things are, and decide how you feel about the people and things about you.

Autonomy is the ability to use your own mind and to determine your thoughts and actions in your own way. It is the ability to be master of your own life and of your own thoughts and actions. It means being able to decide and choose for yourself. You are not the object of other people’s decisions and choices, and you do not accept opinions, standards of behaviour and established ways of life just because someone tells you to accept them. You accept them only because you have convinced yourself to accept them, because you have your own reasons to do so, and because you know that you can always reject them. You shape your own life.

Homo-Democraticus: On the Universal Desirability and the Not So Universal Possibility of Democracy and Human Rights ,page 403
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1904303269

Awareness

Be aware of your natural surroundings, don’t get caught up in what you are doing to the extent that you forget about the world you live in.

Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future. A good illustration… is driving to work in the morning in a hurry. The decisive question is: ‘Where is the mind when the body is here? and there are three common cases…

The fourth case is the person who is aware, and who will not hurry because he is living in the present moment with the environment which is here: the sky and the trees as well as the feeling of motion. To hurry is to neglect that environment and to be conscious only of something that is still out of sight down the road…

Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Chapter 16
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0141938366

Balance

Maintain balance in your life; When you look for personal growth, you will find opportunities in many areas. Each endeavor you go for will have its own focus, but none of these areas should clash with each other or take over your life.

We cannot become so obsessed by a beneficial habit that we lose sight of other important areas of life.

Zen and the Art of Wholeness, page 216
https://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=0595339204

Face yourself

Change self-defeating patterns of behaviour; Identify your weak points, what are you scared of, what is holding you back? Create a plan for resolving this inner conflict.

To identify your weaknesses, ask yourself these questions: What do you keep doing that you can’t seem to master? What do you least enjoy doing? What are the aspects of your personality that hold you back? What do other people identify as a weakness for you? …don’t feel compelled to list every weakness you can think of. Limit yourself to the ones that can have a negative impact on the achievement of your dream.

It’s Do-Able!: Power To Unleash Your Dream, Canaan Mashonganyika

Give

Become a giver, not a taker. Get into the habit of giving to something each day which you do not personally benefit from.

How much love can you give? How good a friend can you be? The rewards you will gain by becoming a GIVER will reap for you true peace and a feeling of beautiful wholeness.

Walking on Sunshine, Suzy Harrison Ward

Happiness

Find inner happiness; Your happiness should be spontaneous, you should be able to walk down the street and just be happy for absolutely no reason. Your happiness should not be dependent on any external stimulation.

‘Take a look,’ I said. ‘If you want to find inner happiness, go outside on a nice day with lots of sun and blue sky. Even if you stand at a window and look out over the city at the cloudless sky, like we’re doing now, you’ll eventually find happiness.

Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex, Anne Frank

Harmony

Live in harmony; How can you increase the overall balance of good and beauty in the world?

The white man calls us “Wild Indians.” We were never wild, we were just natural. Traditional people, in harmony with the world around us. We do not isolate ourselves from other living things, nor consider one creature superior to another… [The Indians are not a primitive people,] they are a traditional people, that is, a “first” or “original” people… the inheritors of a profound and exquisite wisdom distilled by long ages on this earth. The Indian concept of earth and spirit has been patronizingly dismissed as simplehearted “naturalism” or “animism,” when in fact it derives from a holistic vision known to all mystics and great teachers of the most venerated religions of the world.

Two Black Bears: Chief of Navajos, Charles D. Taylor

Integrate your personality

Different parts of you naturally want to head off in different directions. Become aware of everything that motivates you, and of all the different directions your ambitions drag you in, then find inner unity.

Without [inner unity] we are likely to live fragmented lives, never quite fulfilling the unique gift to human history each of us is privileged to carry.

Empowering Leaders, David A. Ramey

Self-awareness

To find out who you really are, step outside yourself and observe how you live and how you interact with other people.

Step outside yourself. Watch yourself going through your day as if you were the star of your own television show. You can make it a comedy or a drama. Hospitals are suited to both. Try playing a laugh track in your head when something preposterous happens — as it often does. The show also keeps you company as your colleagues go home and you’re left alone in the hospital. It turns the clerks, nurses, residents from other services, and even patients into a colorful supporting cast for your lead.

Hospital Survival: Lessons Learned in Medical Training, Grant Cooper

Sensitivity

Tune into other people’s feelings, even if other people hide what bothers them, they will still appreciate if you identify with their concerns.

As we develop our capacity for empathy, we must shift from tuning in to our thinking to tuning in to another person’s perspective. As we begin this shift, many of us will struggle with socialized thinking habits that maintain our self-focused thinking…

When we start to tune in to other people’s perspectives, these old habits may cause us to experience some interference. Often we first struggle with the assumption that everyone thinks and feels as we do. This assumption occurs as we struggle to apply other people’s life experiences to the situation. First we must consider the other person’s life and then extend that consideration to the current situation. If we can extend our perspective in this way, we may discover that the individual’s experience is very different.

Developing Practice Competencies: A Foundation for Generalist Practice, D. Mark Ragg

You can cycle through some of these ideas, to see which ones work best for your own personal growth.

Finding inspiration when things go wrong (as they sometimes will)

February 11, 2017February 20, 2017 Edward Chalk

Finding inspiration when things go wrong

There are two ways you can find inspiration

You can be inspired by the positivity you find when things go right.
You can be inspired when things go wrong, because you know you don’t want to carry on living that way.

The Zohar says that negative inspiration is more powerful than positive inspiration.

דלית נהורא אלא ההוא דנפיק מגו חשוכא

There is no light other than that which emanates from within darkness.

https://he.wikisource.org/wiki/זוהר_חלק_יז

Why are you in a better position to change and grow when things go wrong, than when things go right?
Why does the Zohar say that light emanates from darkness, which implies that the darkness itself is the source of light?

A quote often attributed to Einstein is, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Although this seems obvious, what is not obvious is we fool ourselves into thinking we are doing something different now. In fact we are doing exactly now as the time things went wrong, just in a different time and place.

How can we know when we have actually changed?

The Zohar offers the following clue.

דהא ודאי אמר קהלת (קהלת א’ ט’) “אין כל חדש תחת השמש” אבל למעלה מן השמש יש לו

“It is true that ‘There is nothing new under the sun’, but beyond the sun there is.”

https://he.wikisource.org/wiki/זהר_פרשת_משפטים

Most people are not good at everything. We are born with natural tendencies, and we develop these tendencies into our own way of doing things. There are things we are really good at, but there are weak areas which drag us down in challenging situations.

To change, we need to identify the areas in which we’re not strong, and then find someone brilliant in this area. We need to connect with and learn from someone who conquered in their own lives what we are struggling with. By doing this, we rise above the natural level of “under the sun” existence that we were granted at birth.

Positive inspiration can make your life shine, but negative inspiration has a more powerful potential for change. The realisation that we need to live on a higher plane forces us to rise above our natural operating level. Through seeing the need for change we incorporate the light from other people into our natural way of doing things.

When disappointment shows that life can be better, inspiration forces us to grow beyond our natural selves. In retrospect, the obstacles that made us to think out of our mindset were the source of our progress.

So the darkness itself, is the source of light.

Interdisciplinarity, risk and opportunity

January 31, 2017November 30, 2023 Edward Chalk

The development of new products and services to bring to the marketplace can be driven by scientific advances such as the development of antibiotics, plastics and microchips. However sometimes new and exciting market offerings can be created by bringing together existing technologies and skills sets.

The ability to successfully combine existing knowledge and skills in different areas is referred to as interdisciplinarity.

Interdisciplinarity involves the combining of two or more academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It is about creating something new by crossing boundaries, and thinking across them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdisciplinarity

For example, a company may already possess the component parts of the knowledge required to make a quantum leap forward, however these bits of knowledge are held in siloed areas. To find new opportunities, the specialised knowledge in different departments must be combined and made to work together.

A major route left for economies to stay innovative is better coordination among knowledge communities aimed at sparking synergy creation… For individual firms, this means management’s ability to combine knowledge of individual technologies and consolidate corporate-wide technologies and skills within their organisations.

Competing for Knowledge: Creating, Connecting, and Growing. Page 27

Personal interdisciplinarity

Personal success may also rely on the individual’s ability to combine knowledge and skills in different areas. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci combined scientific knowledge in different areas to advance mankind’s understanding of the body.

Leonardo’s notebooks clearly reveal his fascination with human development… He studied the anatomical composition of muscles and bones… To complete his work in this area, he described human movement as a mechanical system of interlocking parts, claiming his place as one of the first to conceptualize this idea. His notes in this field demonstrate the amazing combination of engineering and medical knowledge Leonardo possessed.

Amazing & Extraordinary Facts – Da Vinci, Notable Notebooks

Steve Jobs combined his deep understanding of humanities and the sciences to produce technically brilliant and attractive consumer electronics.

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told me on the day he decided to cooperate on a biography. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was as if he was describing the theme of his life, and the more I studied him, the more I realized that this was, indeed, the essence of his tale.

https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs

Both at the corporate and at the individual level, opportunity is created when different disciplines are combined to create a multi-faceted result that satisfies difficult-to-reconcile requirements.

Risk and reward

Since opportunity presents itself at the intersection of discipline specific knowledge areas, it would appear that the more disparate the knowledge areas are, the more likely it is that their successful combination will result in a breakthrough.

On the other hand, the more disparate the disciplines are that must be combined to solve a problem, the harder it will be to develop the knowledge in each discipline to a level that will enable convergence of these knowledge areas, therefore the less likely the chances are of success.

The delivery of fusion electricity is not just about understanding plasma. You also have to know the materials you’re going to build the reactor out of. You then need to know how to build the reactor and put all the pieces together. You have to be able to maintain it and it’s really important that you factor this in right at the start. It is absolutely vital that you do all this in an integrated way. You can’t just say that we’re going to make something 10 times hotter than the Sun and it will work. You have to think about the integrated solution.

Professor Ian Chapman, chief executive, UK Atomic Energy Authority

We can therefore identify a correlation between risk and opportunity in interdisciplinary ventures

If the disparity between the required knowledge areas is great, then the venture may have great potential but will also have a high risk of failure due to the difficulty involved in overcoming the incompatibilities between the knowledge domains.
On the other hand, if the disparate knowledge areas easily exhibit homogeneousness, then the risk of not being able to get to the required result is small, but the outcome of combining the knowledge domains will be less significant and will have a lower return.

In conclusion

People and companies often look outwards for new opportunities, however their true path to success may lie in bridging the gap between their existing disparate skills and knowledge areas.

It may be necessary to look outwards for the catalyst that will enable existing skills and knowledge areas to combine, but real growth is almost always the result of grassroots inspiration.

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