How you can be more impactful in the work place- building your sense of empowerment.
As someone that goes to work every day, like many of you, it might be inherently obvious that we will complain about work. When we aren’t planning and setting goals we tend to blame our environment for our perceived negative outlook. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, work is hard, however this mindset can change your perspective on work.
Confession time: think about how many times you have solved the HTH equation? If you are not familiar with this let me explain; the HTH equation was developed to understand just how many Hours Till Home you have left in your day. If you are like 80% of Americans who are unhappy with their jobs you may have done this five- ten times last week.
In order to feel empowered at work and shift that perspective to something positive we need to change our WHY we are going to work. There are always more reasons than monetary to get up early and (select to apply to your profession)
- Drive to a desk chair and exercise our fingers
- Jump into a truck cab and practice freeway navigation
- Carry around tools and keep track of where they ran off to
- Stand in front of judgmental youth
You get the idea, we all have nuances to our job…
…and sometimes these can drive us crazy!!
One way to construct a different why for our work is to ask yourself “What are you learning?” Now I know what you are thinking, “ugh another person telling me I need to learn something. Look man, I work long hours and I’m not going to go open a boring book after those hours. I have some Netflix to catch up on” BUT, that isn’t what I’m talking about. According to psychologist Albert Bandura, we practice what we know we will be successful at, in other words we fall into a routine of easy wins. One way to stretch ourselves is to engage in activities where success isn’t guaranteed. The easiest way to do this is by learning, either a skill, procedure, or concept. Go to work with the intention that it is somewhere you will learn something new. When engaging your work life this way you are no longer letting the work day happen to you, you are now controlling what happens during your day.
Having a drive to learn doesn’t always come naturally.
If you are stuck with finding this multidimensional construct about work, it might be time to set some goals. Setting goals at work in conjunction with a learning mindset can give us that extra boost in the morning. There is a wealth of information about how to set goals and each one is important and meaningful. Here are the three most important factors to using goal setting tools.
- Feedback- you need feedback for setting proper goals, the easiest way to accomplish this is in the form of metrics. These can then be posted somewhere in your work space, lunch box, fridge at home as a reminder. It turns out the place you set this isn’t as important but the…
- Commitment- how you define your goal is key so make sure to give it some thought. You want to set out to do something that is attainable but is outside your norm. Mix this with our passions and curiosity to bring that extra bit of dedication.
- Task difficulty- do you have the skills to accomplish the tasks needed to achieve the goal? If you are like me you aren’t athletic, so my goal isn’t going to play for the NBA but, my goal might be something like “play a game of basketball and make two baskets”. I may not have the skills to do this today but I can grow into this ability.
Once you have set some goals you are on the road to perspective changing. You can go into work with more reasons than monetary and be someone that makes decisions rather than decisions made for you.
If you are not able to move jobs or start a new career you might feel stuck and helpless. If you can look at changing your perspective of why you go to work you may be able to breathe a breath of fresh air and walk into your job ready to take on the day. You are the one to make the moves to change that perspective.