How To Communicate To Your People About Change Without People Tuning Out
March 18, 2019
Increase Your Confidence…and Make It Last
April 15, 2019
Returning from holidays. Have you been on one lately? I don’t know about you, but when you return from holiday, it just almost feels like you’re allergic to work for a period of time and I’ve just been on Christmas holiday and just come back and there’s a whole bunch of my clients going, “I don’t wanna do this anymore.”
The Problem
So what I’m gonna, I guess, talk through is what I talked through with them, which is how when you return from holiday do you deal with your own work allergy so that you can have a better year than you would have otherwise.
Three Principles to Deal With Your Work Allergy
The first one is that there is a tendency when you return to get a little bit emotional, right? About your work. I’ve come back into the picture there, and what I mean by that is there’s this thing in psychology called globalisation, where we globalise our thoughts – my work’s always shit, and this project’s, this company’s always bad, and my team’s terrible, and we often do this when we rebound off a holiday. So the first thing around macro thinking is to kind of just question some of those thoughts. Is it always that bad really? Really? Is it always that terrible? Ask yourself the question.
The second one is, I want you to make the decision about your role when you’re winning, not losing. So here’s the thing, when you return and during the year, you’re going to have wins and loses. You’re gonna have a rhythm that’ll go up and down. I know that because that’s what happens with me and it happens with most of my clients. So, what I want you to do is not to make the decision when you feel bad, but to make the decision about how you feel about your role when things are good, when you’re winning. Now, if when you’re winning, you still go, I don’t think this is for me, it’s probably not for you.
The third one is to make some commitments. Some small commitments. If the macro picture is not good, and if when you’re winning, you still don’t wanna be in your role, try and just say, okay, I’m gonna commit to in three months time delivering this project. I’m gonna commit to my team. I’m gonna commit to client X in that time period because what you might be able to commit to is being in this role for the rest of your life, but what you may be able to commit to is some specific things in a specific timeframe.
This is a little bit mindset and a little bit process. One of the biggest problems is that when people return from breaks, they have this kind of mind warp where their body and mind are all used to being on a holiday and it’s not used to work anymore. It’s like an allergic reaction. I would rather you, rather than take this massive dip, find a way through.
Summary of the Three Principles
- Ask yourself “what is the actual problem?” Rather than globalise everything being bad.
- Make decisions about your career when you are succeeding in your role (rather than failing or when you’ve returned from a holiday). If you still don’t want to be in it while winning, there may some truth to your gut feeling.
- Make a commitment to stay in the role for a shorter time period with a specific focus or goal.
Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch
Hope this has been useful to deal with your work allergy, and that you had a nice holiday. Either send me a note or write to me down below in the comments. See you next time on The Reason and The Road.
