Why Work Feels So Hard

Speaker 0:54

Hi, and welcome to The Fulfilled Leader. Right now, for a lot of people, work is hard. Pressure has increased, and the uncertainty globally is creating anxiety. And when work is hard, we often lose sight of our career dreams. We can become very task-focused, and it can be hard to feel aligned in our work or even to know what career alignment means for us. My hope, because of the work I do, is that we don't take our eye off our career journey. We're going to be, all of us, working for a long time, and the work that we're doing now needs to feel like it's taking us somewhere. We need to be able to see our destination. Our challenge is that if we're tired, stressed, time poor, and anxious, it's hard to find the small pockets of time we need to say what really matters here and where is this taking me. In the podcast today, I'm going to share a couple of ways of looking at this, and they come from two books that I'm leaning on quite heavily for inspiration at the moment. And I'm gonna share with you an exercise that you can do in small pockets to help you think about what really matters. So I'll share two different ways of framing it and offer an exercise to support you in doing that I'm not gonna focus on the big questions like purpose and values and 10-year plans. I think these really matter, but the answers to these can feel really elusive when we're under pressure. So I'm going to share ways of doing this that we can do when we feel stretched and time-poor. And the two books that

Two Simple Frames For Alignment

Speaker 2:49

I'm drawing this from and the two approaches I'm sharing come first of all from Jim Collins' new book, What to Make of a Life, and he talks about encodings. And I'm going to talk about Gay Hendricks from his book, The Big Leap, where he talks about our zone of genius.

Understanding Your Zone Of Genius

Speaker 3:07

So let's start with the zone of genius. In the book club in Flourish, we're reading The Big Leap, and in this book, Gay Hendricks suggests that we all have a zone of genius. But this term can feel very intimidating, and for many of us, even suggesting we have a zone with this title can lead us to thinking, "Well, who do you think you are? I'm not a genius." And it can slightly switch us off. But the definition that he shares I think helps to quieten that voice. He describes our zone of genius as a set of activities that you are uniquely suited to do. They draw upon your special gifts and strengths. I believe that this means it draws on everything we enjoy, that we're good at, along with our experience to date, both personal and professional. Another key feature of the zone of genius is that it's about adding something good to the world. So maybe being a compassionate leader, a trusted mentor, a brilliant accountant, bringing something to others. So the zone of genius is about work that's aligned with our unique combination of strengths, experience, skills, and gifts. We may or may not feel like a genius, but rather this is something that we're uniquely good at.

Encodings And What Stays True

Speaker 4:34

The second is encodings, which Jim Collins introduces in his book What to Make of a Life. He describes our encodings as durable capacities of a person's intrinsic construction that lie within, awaiting discovery through the experience of life. Let me read that again, 'cause it's quite technical. They are durable capacities of a person's intrinsic construction that lie within, awaiting discovery through the experience of life. I believe that he is saying a similar thing. He's focusing on us looking at what is intrinsic to us and what stays with us through our life or grows over the span of our life. For example, somebody who might be naturally good at languages or science or debating. We take the example of debating, somebody might be very good at debating and becomes a barrister. One person I know, her encoding is a love to solve problems, and in some ways the context is agnostic as long as there is a problem to solve. Another client enjoys strategic leadership, another leading through complex systems. Encodings can be something we deepen and grow in over time. For example, I often speak to people who are really a bit unsure about their leadership ability, but as they grow in experience, they see how all of their life experiences have brought them to being a good leader. They're able to draw on their people skills, on their natural strategic talent, and on their ability to bring others together around a problem In both definitions, they're suggesting that life and work will be more fulfilling when we are able to work within our genius or encodings. So how do we get clear about what they are, and how do we get there when we're time poor? Jim suggests that discovering encodings requires trial and error, experimentation, missteps, happy accidents, and disappointments. And I'm gonna share with you how we try some of those things out so we can get closer to finding out what our encodings are.

Spotting Themes In Your Own Career

Speaker 6:51

I've personally been working hard on this in the past few years so that I could get clearer about my zone of genius or encodings, particularly at this stage of my life. So if I look back at my career and my current state, I can see some themes. I'm a qualified teacher. I'm an avid reader. I collect leadership and self-help ideas, a master certified coach. I have a master's in organization consulting, which I don't often talk about, and I've done a lot of work on myself in therapy, journaling, courses, and more self-help, of course. But this all comes together for me in something I love to do, and that's the combination of coaching and teaching. I love to learn something and then share it via teaching or coaching, as I'm doing right now. And I love to do this about work and organizational life, focusing on helping us all to be more emotionally resilient at work, to be in careers that are aligned with what matters to us, and where we have the relational skills to navigate complex work settings. So I believe that all of that experience, the courses I've done, the work I've done on myself, the coaches I've worked with, the therapists I've worked with, have kind of brought together a set of skills that feels very aligned and encoded with who I am. I don't see myself as a genius. I'm just bringing together these parts of my nature and my experience in an offering to others, and I can see this clearly because I've been tracking it. I've been keeping a close eye on what gives me energy and fulfillment at work. I've been looking at what happens when I have a good day and what happens when a day is challenging. As I'm sharing this, I hear you say, "Mm, Jean, that's all v- fine for you. I simply don't have time in my day to step back and look at this. I'm working for a large organization. I'm managing the kids, aging parents. I've got a lot going on. And when I do begin to think about it, I feel too depressed because I don't have the energy to make a change." So I'm going to introduce to you a simple exercise which I've adapted from Jim Collins' work, which I think helps you to at least begin to find some clues, even in this time where you're very time-pressured and where life is challenging He has often talked very openly and widely about his daily tracking system, which he does on a spreadsheet, and he uses a simple scale. He gives

The Plus Two Minus Two Method

Speaker 9:23

each day a rating from minus two to plus two. You could rate these however you want, but you might say plus two is super positive and minus two is really bad. And in any week, you might have a minus two day on a Monday, maybe Tuesday is neutral, zero, maybe Wednesday is plus one. His goal was to build a working life that had more plus two days in it, and he was very, very intentional about this. And so as I've said, it will be very much up to you to work out what those plus two days are. What are the qualities that make a plus two day? For him, it was work in creativity, which he would focus in research and writing so that he can share his amazing books with us. Using this framing and his reflection, so taking all of the analysis from his data, he's made some big decisions, including walking away from a prestigious academic career so that he could have fewer minus two days and more plus two days.

Four Steps To Run Small Experiments

Speaker 10:23

And I've adapted this and created a four-step process for you to try, which I believe you can do in a very short space of time in your time poor schedule. The first is just to do what he was doing and start auditing. You can use his method or another, but make it really easy. Maybe it's a note on your phone or a spreadsheet on your computer, and decide to audit for at least a couple of weeks. Don't make any changes yet. So at the end of the day, take a few minutes, do a quick review and rating, and if you've only got that time, just do that. Just give the day a rating. If you've got a little bit more time, make a couple of notes about why you gave that day the rating. So if it was a fulfilled, productive, accomplished day and you gave it a plus two, you might want to write down what were you doing? What was the type of work you were doing? Who were you with? What was the context? Were you doing deep work or relational work? Was it data or creative? Any criteria for you. Same for a minus two day. What was going on on that day? What were you doing that might have been leading for that to be a really tough day? And in any of these days, it might just be one piece of the day. So it might be one encounter or piece of work that took it above the line or below the line. Log that too, just so that when you go back, you can see what type of activities are making your best days and your worst days. So that's step one, do the audit. Don't take more than five minutes doing this every day. Just do it really quickly. Step two is review your audit. So when you've got a- at least two weeks' data and a quiet moment, maybe go to a coffee shop with your data and review it and look for the patterns, and begin to see what are the one or two types of work or activities or the context that consistently gave you a good number or a better number, and what are the ones that consistently gave you a lower number? And you might begin to start playing with the idea now, these ones that are giving me plus two moments, are they in my zone of genius? Am- I encoded to do that? Are they what really brings me fulfillment and even moments of joy at work? You can use questions to help you with this. You can look at them and say, "Well, which of those pieces of work seemed effortless even though I procrastinated before I got down to it? Once I was there, I was in flow, and I was enjoying work. What did that look like?" You could ask questions about when your interest or intellectual curiosity was stimulated, what was going on there? So that's step two, you do review. And then for step three, what you want to do is start doing some tiny experiments. You want to look at your plus two days and think, "How could I bring more of those activities into my current working environment? Probably, I can't change my environment right now, but I'm gonna bring something in to make it better." So for example, if you see that having mentoring conversations on a plus two day really helps you to feel good in that day, make time, increase the number of mentoring conversations you're doing and see how that works. Or maybe you s- did some really deep work on those days. You took a couple of hours, switched off all your notifications, and you sat with a difficult problem, and maybe that gave you a plus two day. Try some experiments, see if you can bring those in, and keep tracking. So don't All through this process, don't stop tracking because you're wanting to look for long-term patterns. And that's step four, to keep tracking and keep testing with the goal of increasing your total. You might decide to increase your weekly or your monthly total. I think monthly is probably more, more realistic. So if you're currently running and your number, your total month number is twenty-five, don't aim too high. Try to get twenty-six next month or twenty-seven. See if you can just do small nudges to make some small changes. I know

Two Caveats That Can Trip You Up

Speaker 14:32

that over time when we do this, we can bring more things into our work that feed us, but there are of course, a couple of caveats that I'm gonna share. There's probably many more that I'm not sharing here. The first of these is one that I've noticed in myself, is that when I begin to look at my encodings, I can hear or feel voices of, "Oh, that you shouldn't be doing that," or, "You should be doing that instead." So f- a smaller example for me is that I've really begun to love writing in my day and creating things, like creating the podcast and social media and stuff, just writing. Writing helps me make sense of my thinking, and it leads me to knowing how to help others. It makes- helps me make sense of theories I'm reading that I could then maybe practically teach. And I know that if I write in a day, I'm much more likely to have a plus two day. Even if I only get 30 minutes of writing in that day, I have a better day. But I often hear this voice that says, "Hmm, don't do any writing now. It's not productive. Go and do your emails or reach out to some clients, or just sort your finances out." I can hear that voice, and I've learned to gently quieten it. So watch out for shoulds or oughts or shouldn'ts or oughtn'ts as you're going through this process. The other caveat is that while you're doing this, you might have a sinking realization that you are really not aligned in your current role, and you may feel you need to change it, and that can feel really demoralizing. And right now, you don't wanna add to your mood and be more demoralized. You want to be able to stay having some good moments in your job in the present, and you also want to have the energy to look for a good job in the future. If this happens, still look for ways to bring those small moments of joy into your work now, even if it's really not aligned with what you want to do. Find tiny increases, because they will help you to have a better day, and in turn, that will help you to have the energy to start working out how to make a change Getting to the heart of what it is that we're encoded for is a journey, and we need to be open to being deeply curious about what it is for us. I know for me it's been really worth the effort. I'm getting many more plus two days, and I really hope for you that you will find more fulfillment in your work.

Where To Get The Written Exercise

Speaker 17:00

If you'd like to see the exercise in writing here, you can head over to my Substack. There's a link in the show notes. Or you can become a member of Flourish, where there's a much more detailed version of this exercise and other exercises, as well as an opportunity to have conversations with people about how to get more aligned with your encodings in your working life