7 Steps Towards Turning Your Work/Life Pain into Pleasure

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Does this picture fit you?

  • sleeplessness
  • being angry a little too often
  • frequent frustration
  • increased absenteeism from work
  • presenteeism (going to work when you were so sick you should have stayed home)
  • reduced concern for customers/ clients
  • emotional exhaustion
  • a reduced sense of accomplishment
  • unable to switch off from work

These are some of the pains you feel when the demands of work and personal life are all too much for you. They can be summed up in one word – stress.

The hidden danger is in the insidious effects of such symptoms, the outcomes of which may not surface for months or even years. But if left unattended, the wheels can eventually fall off, often in dramatic and life-diminishing ways. These include stress-related illnesses, heart conditions, relationship breakdowns, job loss and depression.

When you are not enjoying life, it often seems hard to change things around. The following seven steps may, however, make the task easier for you.

  1. The first step is always the most difficult – deciding you really want to take action and do something productive to ease your work/life pain. Once you’ve made that decision, you’ll enjoy the rest of the process.
  2. Create your own enjoyment. Sounds a bit trite? There’s more to what I call “the enjoyment factor” than first meets the eye.
     
    Enjoyment:

    • Is a creatable experience from which fun, laughter and pleasure are automatic reactions. If you’re not enjoying life, you’re unlikely to achieve the positive frame of mind needed to resolve your work life harmony problems.
    • Is a natural mechanism for coping with stress, because your mind is unconsciously transported to a world within the real you – your authentic self – a world in which you feel relaxed, de-stressed and at peace with yourself. Your problems are put on hold.
    • Heightens your sense of self esteem, self confidence, self belief and feelings of self worth. When your mind returns to the real world, the heightened feelings flow, like a ripple effect, through every thing else you do. The intensity of the enjoyable experience will determine how long and how wide the ripple effect will extend. It can even trigger a new outlook on life.
  3. Do it often, even if only for a few minutes at a time. The more often you create your chosen enjoyable experiences, the better your chances of stabilizing your thinking and your ability to juggle your responsibilities. You might be surprised how much this can help you review how and where you allocate your energies.
  4. You can create enjoyment at work, home and play. Play (any personally chosen discretionary interest that you undertake just for enjoyment) has for too long been undervalued regarding its benefits to work and other responsibilities of life. Much stress comes from a lack of control over what happens to you, the changes being imposed on you and the expectations demanded of you. Discretionary interests – play, leisure, recreation, sport, “time for me”, call it what you will – is perhaps your last bastion of total control and freedom of choice. The more often you get control of your life through leisure interests that you love, the better you will be able to survive and thrive in today’s frenetic lifestyle.
  5. Enjoyable experiences generate new emotional energy to replace the energy burnt by your stress. A lot of the pain of a discordant work life mix is you are trying to burn energy you simply don’t have. It’s not rocket science to realize that you need to replace burnt energy. Resting isn’t enough. A car needs more than regular refueling – its longevity requires regular care and maintenance. It’s the same with you.
  6. Create leisure experiences that are not only enjoyable but are opposite – or at least quite different – to those experienced at work. If you work in a busy and noisy environment, a quiet, perhaps solitary, experience may help, if the work is intellectual then create enjoyable physical or manual experiences. The emphasis here is on experiences of the mind that make you feel good about yourself, irrespective of whether the interest is physical or mental. In the final analysis, every enjoyable experience is of the mind.
  7. How to fit it into the week’s busy schedule. Enjoyment isn’t limited to weekends, joining clubs, or any other of the old leisure traditions. It’s about doing your own thing whenever and wherever you wish, at any time of the day or night and on any day of the week. A few minutes of ‘flight’ can sustain a day of ‘fight’ if, during that time, your inner person is allowed out to enjoy the freedom of self-expression. Self-created interests can include musical appreciation by listening or playing, art, craft, beading, genealogy, bird-watching, walking for pleasure, gardening – anything that transports your thinking into your own world of enjoyment. When you lose yourself in an interest you love you find yourself – the person of worth within you.

These factors do not of themselves overcome a discordant work life mix. They do however generate a more positive attitude, in which you feel good about yourself. You are establishing a revitalized outlook on life that strengthens your self-confidence. Your problems either don’t seem so great any more, or you perceive them more calmly and with a sense of personal power in your ability to make your daily life more enjoyable.

In the final analysis these steps will enable you to become a better friend to the most important person in the world – you!

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About the Author

Peter Nicholls is Australia’s People Gardener – cultivating vigorous personal growth to thrive to one’s full natural potential. Visit Peter’s website at http://www.workleisure.com or contact him at peter@workleisure.com.

Worrying is Not a Business Plan

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In your kitchen you probably have a spice or powder-filled container with a plastic top that has two tabs – one for pouring or spooning, and one for sprinkling. That top is most likely derived from the original Flapper my company invented.

Today there’s an entire line of Flapper products used by over 150 companies, including Durkee, Cremora, San Giorgio, Ronzoni, and McCormick. Thanks to that initial success, over the years I’ve been able to build a multimillion-dollar manufacturing company that provided me with the means to be a major philanthropist, endowing hospitals, universities, and charities that offer valuable help to thousands of people.

I tell you this not to brag, but to make the point that the tips I share with you in this article concerning leveraging adversity to reach new heights of professional success in a tough economy have stood the test of time.

These tips will help you stop worrying and start doing… Remember, when it comes to all types of adversity, taking positive action with the ideas you believe are the wisest at the moment, (knowing that things may change for the better or worse tomorrow), can’t help but lead to eventual success.

Let’s start with the first and fundamental rule of successful management through good times and bad. It’s one, tragically, that executives often forget…

[wcm_restrict]Management and employee success are intertwined

I can gauge the health of any business in the faces of the employees, for beyond all the mechanics of the place there is one truth: a viable business is a collective human endeavor. Indeed, much of what is wrong in a good deal of current business theory – and which has come to the surface now that times are hard – is the failure to recognize that the heart of any business beats to the rhythms of its employees.

The bottom line must not be profit, because profit can only come as a fruit of the health and dreams of the human endeavor the business represents. Management’s training and development responsibility, then, is to cultivate within the work place an environment which lends itself to creativity, dreams, and collective spirit larger than the sum of its paychecks and mechanical parts.

For example, at one of Weatherchem’s first staff meetings we discussed company benefits. As we knocked around ideas to promote productivity, commitment and creativity, the plant controller asked, “Why bother? People are like cattle. You can herd them any way you want.”

I fired him. Of the original handful of employees, he was the only one who did not stay. From that day forward I made sure everyone at Weatherchem understood my lifelong fundamental conviction: everyone deserves to be loved, respected and honored; we all win or lose together.

This brings me to the second tip I want to share with you concerning how to survive the current economic adversity we’re all experiencing and strengthen your business for the future:

Make collaboration with employees your path to success

It’s far better to collaborate. I’ve always preferred to plant seeds in other’s minds while they plant seeds in mine. Some germinate and some don’t. But those that do tend to sprout and bloom for me in wonderful ways.

So if your business is currently suffering, walk around and talk to all your employees. Ask: How can we improve this place? What’s wrong here?

I guarantee you will get more valuable information in just a few hours than you could possibly act upon in a year! Allow me to share with you a personal reminiscence to illustrate my point…

Fifty years ago at the age of 30, when I was working for my father at the Weatherhead Company, I sat down with the 15 members of the AFL-UAW Local 463 union negotiation committee led by its president, John Allar, to discuss the financial hardships we were suffering.

We were in a helluva pickle. Annual sales at the Cleveland plant were $9 million and we were down $2.7 million. I said to Allar, “Rather than be at each other’s throats as we sink, let’s work together – collaborate – and figure out how we’re going to get out of this mess…”

You know what? The Weatherhead Company and the union did get out of that mess – by working together.

To his day I don’t understand why Congress had the top executives of the auto industry come to Washington to participate in hearings, but didn’t call in a union negotiating committee from one, two or all three car companies. Why would Congress not want to hear the union side of things?

For that matter, why didn’t Congress have the smarts to invite a contingent of assembly line workers to share viewpoints from the factory floor? (Those hard-working, blue-collar folks would probably have put forth the most valuable testimony of all!)

The bottom line is that Congress and the Executive Branch may have comprehension of the problems facing the auto industry, but they don’t have practical knowledge on how to rectify what’s wrong.

Don’t you make the same mistake: Talk to your employees. Discover what’s running through their minds, and be sure to let them know what you’re thinking, and that you want their help because you’re all in the same boat.

If you must cut salaries, for example, also make sure your employees know that there will be a firm salary restoration date or make clear the company performance criteria/metrics for reinstating full salaries.

While we’re on the subject of cutting things, be it salaries or the number of your employees, let me tell you that the word “cutting” is negative, and for that reason I dislike using it or even thinking it.

Don’t speak or even think in terms of cutting, instead, use the term saving. For example, I would position a company-wide salary cut as a company-wide salary savings.

It may strike you as mere word-play, but trust me, substituting the positive imagery of “savings” for the negative connotation of “cutting” will help to rally your employees and persuade them to view you as a caring and compassionate leader doing your best to fairly and evenly spread the pain – which, I hope you truly are!

Finally, we come to my last tip, which is to pay extra-close attention to your customers. Here, two rules of marketing/sales during times of economic strife come into play:

  • It’s easier/cheaper to keep a current customer than to find a new one.
  • You get 80% of your business from 20% of your customers.

(The tried and true 80/20 rule is actually called the “Pareto Principal” after the Italian economist who first recognized it in the early 1900s. It applies to many areas: 80% percent of contributions come from 20% of a charity’s donors… and so on.)

Chances are, many of your customers are going through the same economic turmoil you’re experiencing, and are looking for ways to realize cost cutting (I mean cost savings, of course.)

Your timely customer service visit, telephone call or email might be just the ticket to let that 20% treasure-trove of current best customers know how much they mean to you and get them thinking they would be better off reducing – or eliminating – the business they do with some other company, as opposed to yours!

Use these tips and build upon them one after another, and you will be the ultimate master of your adversity during tough economic times – as well as when financial prosperity once again returns, which I’m confident it will.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Albert J. Weatherhead is the author of The Power of Adversity and chairman and CEO of Weatherhead Industries, a private manufacturer of plastic closures for food, spice, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products. Please visit www.powerofadversity.net or www.weatherchem.com for more information.

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 21d – An Interview with Duane Sparks, author of Masters of Loyalty

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 21d – An Interview with Duane Sparks, author of Masters of Loyalty explores how professional salespeople can move customers beyond being merely satisfied to true loyalty such that they have stopped shopping and are highly resistant to competitors’ appeals. During our discussion, Duane Sparks, author of Masters of Loyalty: How to turn your sales force into a loyalty force. and Chairman and Founder of The Sales Board, shares with us his insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • what true customer loyalty is
  • why customer loyalty programs do not make customers loyal
  • the benefits of attaining real customer loyalty
  • how to earn customer loyalty using the Action Selling process

Additional Information

In addition to the invaluable selling skills insight Duane shares in Masters of Loyalty and this special edition podcast, please visit his company’s Sales Training or Sales Management site. To discover why this selling skill is so effective at maximizing sales productivity, purchase Duane’s book: Masters of Loyalty.

Complimenting Masters of Loyalty, are Duane’s four other books on the consultative sales process including:


Read a Summary of the above Sales Books.

Final Request…

The strength of our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider rating us on iTunes by clicking here. Rating the StrategyDriven Podcast and providing your comments online improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community.

Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Podcast!

About the Author

Duane Sparks, author of Masters of Loyalty, is Chairman and Founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based strategic sales training company that has trained and certified more than 350,000 salespeople in more than 3,000 groups in the system and skills of Action Selling. He has written five sales books, personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions and continues to engage in the business and art of the strategic sales process. Read Duane’s full biography and the history of Action Selling Sales Management Training.
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