What Efforts Do I Enjoy Being a Part Of?
This was the foremost question on my mind as I started my Life Engineering curriculum, but it was surprisingly something that I did not realize was so important until later in life. I learned as a child that people hated work and that work was something you did to be able to live. So it did not matter very much what tasks you did because they all had to be done. It became higher on my list when I got to a point where I had a successful career with many moving parts, however my career had progressed to an area I did not enjoy being a part of for many years.
Since then I have found it much easier to work on things when they are an efforts I enjoy being part of. When I care how the outcome will affect other people it seems to work for me. Others may feel great when they profit or are promoted repeatedly for performing what may be considered heartless tasks that benefit organizations at the expense of people. But what makes work interesting is to me is the satisfaction that the effort yields something that is designed to benefit everyone.
Sometimes things we do seems to have large value to others but they do not make us feel good, while others, which may have less value to those around us, are very satisfying. Once I felt at odds with the overall approach of a company I worked for because achieving the goal gave me a negative feeling. Because of this I could not sell myself and was not able to perform to my high standards. It is important to know which efforts make you feel good and to think of them when determining your path.
In nearly any industry, even within the same organization, you can find and choose from among different categories of effort depending on the kind of effort the tasks in that category will support. Here is a list of some outcomes to which people often relate, and which yield satisfaction in one or several of these areas.
How you feel after completing something is often a function of your upbringing, your direction, and the events in your life. However, sometimes it is desirable to adapt to enjoy the results of a particular task. A work environment that fosters appreciation for the completion of tasks can often mold employees to enjoy the feeling of completion even in areas where they may not have before. A social group can praise or reward people for both negative and positive behavior by regularly praising the completion of tasks. These are more a factor of human behavior and personality. People can change this predisposed wiring just like any other part of themselves. For this chapter, however, we will look only at identifying and knowing these things in ourselves so that we can determine what best suits our path.
Come back next week as we conclude this seven part series on the list of how to personalize a path that works for our lives.