Category Archives: Work

#242 Pleasing others (or yourself)

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In the workplace, you’ll meet two kinds of people, those who are easy to please and those who are hard to please. The former will make you feel good about yourself, the latter will push you to greater achievements. The former can make you complacent, and the latter can drain you of your energy and motivation.

Oh, don’t forget, the person you have the closest contact with in the workplace is YOU. Are you easy to please or are you hard to please? Do you set low standards that are laughably easy to achieve or do you set high standards that are ridiculously difficult to achieve? Is your goal setting predictably low, or predictably high?

Start with awareness of how you are measuring yourself. Sometimes the task is new or complex, and setting goals is hard. Devote your energies to finding out what it takes to set a goal, then set a reasonable goal followed by a stretch goal.

The “pleasing” part refers to the thoughts, feelings, and emotion that accompanies the goal setting.

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#239 Flexible and adaptable

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If you are flexible and adaptable, you will never suffer. That is guaranteed. It is also guaranteed, depending on how much ground you have to cover, that you will face mild to severe discomfort when developing flexibility and adaptability.

First, what is flexibility and adaptability:

  • It is listening to your audience with an open mind and being able to repeat what is truly on your audience’s mind.
  • It is adjusting your approach, whether it is your behavior, your process, or specific steps to what you do.
  • It is finding creative solutions by minimizing or eliminating the need to compromise by anyone.

What it is not:

  • It is not abandoning your values and beliefs. You will stay true to your values beliefs, but modify your approach.
  • It is not abandoning who you are. You do not have to give up who you are as a person.
  • It is not saying “yes” when you really mean “no.”

The inability to think critically and inability to sort through your thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and simply reacting is the foundation for inflexibility. Once you sort it all out, the discipline to behave differently is what will make you flexible and adaptable.

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