More than you can chew?
For pdf click here MORE THAN YOU CAN CHEW
Progress Magazine’s “Best Places to Work Issue” August 2011
By Karen Kelloway
I highly suspect that Lu is suffering from career burnout, but he isn’t your typical employee. Still, twice a day Lu performs at Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park. Earlier this year under the hot Florida sun, my son and I joined the audience that watched him emerge from his shaded spot among the water lilies to take his position in front of a trainer for his noontime feeding.
“Lu used to be a movie star,” the trainer said through the microphone hooked around her ear. She threw a quartered cantaloupe in the air as Lu made a colossal effort to catch it in his large mouth. “But Lu didn’t follow directions well. He was considered stubborn, so he retired early from the movies and has lived here ever since.”
The trainer continued to shell out quartered and halved melons from her bucket as she waited patiently for Lu to open wide. “Lu of course doesn’t need us to cut up his fruit like this,” she added. “He can easily eat a watermelon whole. We just cut them up to make the show more entertaining.” At that point I swear I saw Lu roll his eyes.
Why am I using a 6,000 pound hippo to illustrate my point? Because it does show what happens when a “star” employee gets caught up in the trap of being coaxed into taking on more and more work just because they’re good at it. Then weeks or even days later, they’ve moved from feeling energized to drained.
When I was researching my book, Nail It! Six Steps to Transform Your Career, I came across this quote by Peter Drucker that seemed to address this career conundrum: “A person’s strengths and the way that person performs rarely conflict; the two are complementary. But there is sometimes a conflict between a person’s values and his or her strengths. What one does well—even very well and successfully—may not fit with one’s value system.”
Think about that: just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean it aligns with what you value. I find this a fascinating and relevant take on career burnout. You can see how we get into a hamster wheel of relentless forward motion and yet don’t feel satisfied with the output. We owe it to ourselves to get aligned.
Recently, I was delighted to hear Chris Power, the CEO of Capital Health, talk about this topic at the Human Resource Association of Nova Scotia’s 2011 conference. Power referenced the leadership program her organization has undertaken and the impact it’s having on integrating employees’ passions into their daily roles and responsibilities.
One example I particularly liked was of a mailroom clerk who loves to paint. Power spoke to the employee about how she could integrate painting into her daily responsibilities. When the employee realized that painting didn’t fit into her mailroom duties, she started spending some of her lunch breaks painting with veterans in a long-term care facility. This volunteer activity heightened her enthusiasm for her regular work, and she showed up more motivated. Power is a CEO who gets the importance of aligning employee’s personal values with the organization.
What do you value? What’s most important to you? Are your values being honored and respected at work? This isn’t always easy to decipher. One of my clients, a busy executive with a young family, was having a hard time articulating how her core value of “family” could be present in her career. The feeling that she was choosing work over family frustrated her; it was beginning to diminish her career enjoyment.
While working through this issue, she realized that she had to be more specific in letting others know how to support her. When she was on deadline and feeling productive at work, she needed her family’s support so she could work the extra time to meet the deadline. On the flip side, she had to take control of her schedule so if she wanted to take her son to the library on a Friday afternoon, she had her colleagues’ support. She named what she needed so she could make value-based decisions.
We all have the responsibility to check in and see if we’re living our values. Some call it a gut feeling; others call it intuition. If it’s not happening, it keeps you up at night. It creates tension in your stomach when you’ve agreed to something you wish you hadn’t. It’s when you experience something at work that doesn’t align with your values. It’s your “internal alignment detector.” We’re much more content in our career if we pay attention to it. It’s something to think about the next time you feel yourself biting off more than you want to chew.
Questions for Reflection
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- What strengths do you attribute to your greatest success?
- What strengths are being most used in your career now?
- What ones are lieing dormant?
- What are your energy drains at work? Why?
- Why do you do what you do?
- Reflecting on the above questions, where do you want to focus your energy over the coming month? What stays; what goes to the slug pile; what’s delegated to allow someone else to grow?
Connections
Connections – that was the theme of this years conference for the Human Resource Association of Nova Scotia.
I did a workshop based on my career book, NAIL IT! Six Steps to Transform Your Career.
I had a great group of about 40 HR professionals interested in getting some tips to take back to their workplace. We spent the majority of our time talking about how to Name and Reframe what we want in our ideal work experience and then integrating our personal values into the kinds of projects and responsibilities we take on in our daily tasks. When something is off in our career, most of us tend to start down the road of focusing on all the things that aren’t working. So use that information and Reframe the negative into what your ideal would look like if you had it your way.
I love how one workshop participant described this tendency to start focusing on what’s not going well. She said when things are working, we don’t usually stop and think about why they are working, we just enjoy the work. But when things aren’t going well, we tend to stop and ask why and focus on that.
Leadership coaching focuses on both and supports individuals in moving their experiences (good and bad) into meaningful productive work that benefits both themselves and the organization.
How can we connect with what is important to us so that we can get more of that in our career? Whether you are transforming your career or are transitioning to something completely different. The process is the same. It starts with Naming what you want. That’s the first step in my book . Try It!
 My KBRS colleague, Stephen Pamenter introduced me at the event. |
 Connecting with the Group |
 Chapters had a book store at the conference - love the company NAIL IT! keeps |
March is Nutrition Month
photo: Author Karen Kelloway with her children, Tristan and GabrielleBreakfast for Learning is an organization dedicated to ensuring every child attends school well-nourished. We all want our kids to go to school ready to learn. That’s why I’m teaming up with Breakfast for Learning to not only nourish a child’s mind, but nourish a child. Buy a book and help us feed more kids – or just donate directly to Breakfast for Learning.
Sometimes a Seven out of Ten Can Be Perfect
An Altered Definition of Perfection
My daughter, Gabrielle, recently turned three. Like every other parent, I wanted her birthday to be perfect. Just before I carried over the cake I thought I should get a photo of it ─ you know, for her album. As I looked through the lens, tipping the plate up with my free hand to get a better angle, the cake slipped right off the plate…right onto me. Smoosh. And if that wasn’t bad enough, in my effort to save the cake I dropped the camera….which landed in the icing. As the kiddie choir started belting out “Happy Birthday”, I hurriedly pieced the cake back together, wiped enough frosting off the lens to get a passable photo of my daughter blowing out her #3 candle, and smiled as my daughter delighted in icing-filled bites of delicious cake. Phew.
As hard as it is for perfection-seeking beings (eg. most of you reading this) to accept ─ a seven out of ten sometimes is perfection. It’s all about accepting what’s important in the moment.
In my book, Nail It! Six Steps to Transform Your Career, I talk about living in the moment and enjoying the success you’ve created as a way of creating greater success and fulfillment. Here’s an excerpt from the last chapter “Let Your Vision Catch Up to You.”
“We often think we have to do everything at once. What if we chose instead to focus on the handful of things we can do well, right now, at this stage of our lives? What’s most important to you right now? What activities—both at home and at work—are fueling you and giving you the most enjoyment? How can you do more of that?
This is what it means to live in the now. Having a personal vision or story to guide you helps you make the best daily and weekly decisions as to where to focus next. A personal vision really comes down to what success looks like for you and what you want to achieve in your life.” (Nail It! p. 134)
My 2011 wish for you is that you define what success is for yourself and stop to enjoy the cake along the way. For me, I’m going to stick to what I do well – baking the cake. From now on, I’ll let someone else take the pictures.
- Karen
“Karen Kelloway offers clear and useful strategies in helping you approach your work life with dignity and consciousness. She has coached high level clients, and you can take in her wisdom, motivation and strategy right here. You have the talent, dream, and instincts to make anything possible. Begin your journey today!” ─  Tama J. Kieves, bestselling author of This Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love (How One Harvard Lawyer Left It All to Have It All!)
Align with Your Values
Oh how I’ve resisted the Blog. For years people have been suggesting – quite strongly in some cases – that I simply must blog. All the gurus are doing it, they argue. How can you possibly create a following if you’re not providing fresh content, they say. I hear you. And…I’m still thinking about it. Because I still have this niggly feeling that the people I coach and the people in my workshops and the people who read my books already have a full schedule and then some. They have a hard enough time keeping up with their e-mails. How are they going to find time to read a Blog?  If they’re going to invest their precious time to surf the net it’s to plan a desperate escape to some tropical island – or at least that’s what I do.
…What I do love, though, is providing information, coaching and support that helps people create more success and enjoyment in their careers. And if I think about a Blog as a way of supporting that goal, then I can better embrace the idea of using this new medium. Our actions have to align with our values if we’re going to feel good about our work.  In my book, Nail It! Six Steps to Transform Your Career, I talk a lot about how to figure out what you value, what’s most important to you and then translate that into your ideal career. So let’s start there. What are your top three values, what do they mean to you and how are they showing up for you in your current career? You can read Step Two: Acknowledge It for some further thinking and support on values.
I’ve also learned along the way to listen to that niggly feeling – sometimes called intuition – that is telling me people’s time is precious. So, here’s my plan. Because I value meaningful connections, I’m committing to connecting through this Blog. Because I value your time, I’ll keep my posts minimal.  I’m open to building a community of followers who are open to becoming wildly successful and fulfilled in their careers. So I’ve left room for comments where you can share your own experiences of how you are using Nail It! and the coaching ideas within my book. We can all learn from each other, in a way that works for us. We can all create work that we love and a life we enjoy. So let’s get started.
