How Winning at Work Can Help with Healing and Happiness at Home!
July 2017By Lisa Tuset, Life and Executive Coach
As humans, our ultimate goal in life, our ever-reaching aim, is to find happiness. Happiness is defined uniquely for every individual, but we all want it. Just about everything we do is motivated by what we think will make us happy. When we’re happy, we contagiously spread that joy to those around us – at home, work, at Starbucks … everywhere we go. When we’re excelling at life (however we may define that), it contributes immensely to our level of joy. For those of us who work in a professional setting, often excelling can be defined as achieving personal and company goals, nailing results, exceeding our clients’ expectations – all of these bring us a certain amount of joy. Think about it for just a minute: Search through your thoughts and identify the last time you were really happy. Didn’t life – for that moment – feel simple? Clear? Easy?
The connection I want to make here is that oftentimes, we look for happiness at home to fuel happiness at work. Rarely do we look to elevate our level of happiness and success at work to fuel our happiness at home. The bottom line is, each one is directly connected to the other. At times, we may not be able to control the personal dilemma going on around us. We’ve all had them. Relationships that spiral out of control and end before we even realized there was a problem; a tragedy with a child; a paralyzing medical diagnosis; aging parents; the loss of a loved one; divorce; financial crisis; a fight with our mom. Some of life’s most tragic moments are beyond our control. It is up to us how to respond (there’s much more we could discuss here, but that’s a whole other article). Our professional world can be a place where we have a bit more influence, a bit more control.
Here are 3 tips on how to leverage your professional environment to help with navigating a personal crisis:
- Pinpoint: Identify where you need to re-engage at work, where you need to step it up. Set up a meeting with your boss to set small, achievable goals that can help you inch your way toward improvement. We’re looking for subtle shifts here, which will ultimately lead to radical change.
- Celebrate: Schedule time each week (yes, book it on your calendar so you do it!) to celebrate your progress and wins. This can be as simple as journaling on the week’s accomplishments, saving any recognition emails you receive, documenting how your work positively contributed to the greater good, posting on your Snap story. Or, maybe you have fun with it and celebrate at a happy hour with friends! The how is flexible, whatever your style – the point is blocking intentional time to celebrate where you’re winning! Highlight even the smallest shift – we want to capture it all, every last bit – then celebrate it!
- Give Back: The number one, surefire way to increase your overall happiness is to give of yourself. Someone in your community needs something you can offer! How can you get involved with a volunteer event in your workplace, or perhaps this is a place where you initiate team involvement in a community volunteer event? What is a cause you’re passionate about? Start there! Giving back could be as simple as identifying someone at work that could use your mentoring, a hand with mastering Excel, a buddy to attend a networking event with so they can feel confident making connections, owning an agenda item that you normally wouldn’t take on. Whatever it may be, consider how you could lend a hand. This goes such a long way and can truly deliver an amazing sense of pride and joy for you.
We own flipping the script. If you set goals, outline strategies to achieve them, partner with others for support and accountability, you will win!
So, let us head back to the office tomorrow morning with a new goal. Rather than telling ourselves, I just have to survive until 5 p.m. or my boss knows what I’m going through so he/she will excuse my performance today; let’s be consciously aware that we’re walking into a place of healing, an opportunity for solace. A place where we can control our success, we can intentionally map out our path toward victory, we can find joy in the journey toward our goals, which will in turn fuel clear thinking and pave a path toward healing the personal trauma we are facing today.
We are all in this together, one foot in front of the other, marching our way toward happiness, one victory at a time.
For anyone who needs a little extra support with taking this step, feel free to reach out – together we can map out your personal strategy and identify how you’ll stair-step progress at work to enhance greater clarity and calm at home!
Sincerely,
Lisa Kelley Tuset