So, to be able to perform better, you have to know what to change.
If you want to be clear what to change you need the future vision and the current status. Compare them. Now you have a list of things to change.
Then you need a plan to make those changes.
Prioritize and voilá, you have your strategic plan.
According to several surveys almost 75% of employees are in a job they hate.
So why do they choose to stay? And furthermore, people losing their jobs because of the pandemic are not only stressed but are feeling they are losing their very lives.
The attachment to a job you hate may sound stupid, but the mind is tricky. It finds ways to settle and finds confort zones.
If you are working for someone ales, ando you are not completely and utterly responsible for the permanence, growth and performance of a company (and all the people and their families income) it is very easy to say “not my fucking job”. Even if you are super committed, there is always the option to say it, or blame someone else, or I had a bad day, or my life is not wonderful because my boss, or the company or the owner or whoever you want to blame anything. If you don’t have the owner mentality then it is not your problem, right?
Besides, if you are not the owner, you don’t have on your shoulders the uncertainty and pressure to figure out today what you should do tomorrow to bring your business to better performance, all day, every day. Uncertainty is scarce when you are an employee, your tasks and functions are almost entirely defined.
The downside of having a job is very sad. Statistically, you belong to that 75% that day after day live an empty life.
I think for the majority, they could be happier doing something they love, even if it is very hard to do it, maybe more because it is hard. The thing is, they are very afraid to try it. This damn evolution made us so resistant to change.
So, you see, maybe all these events that Covid19 has fatally brought upon us, for many, being forced to change, the pandemic could be the best that happened to them.
Some habits are proven more effective than others in the quest for productivity and personal fulfillment.
Please note that I didn’t mention success. That is a whole different post in itself.
So I found this video from Impact Theory. It is a curation of 8 extracts from interviews his host Tom Bilyeu has performed in the show.
Even if you are not that inclined to believe some habit could transform the way you live your life, I think you will find these very interesting.
Let me know if anyone of these practices did have an impact in you.
If you love the process then the results are guaranteed because your are getting retribution and satisfaction as of now.
If you love the idea and the process is just a mean, then there is suffering from day one.
Power: ability to do or act; capability of doing something. Almost 6,500,000,000 results in less than 0.68 seconds in google search and it is ever so elusive. So hard to grasp tangibly, yet we feel everyday the effects of people in the exercise of power.
People seek it. We are naturally drawn to it. We silly humans almost always feel powerless, even those who are in positions of power. And when someone is searching it for the sake of possessing it, he gets possessed by it.
But there is a different kind of power. A kinder one. More noble and much less unstable. This kind of power will never explode in your face. This power is not immersed in a sum zero game: the selfless power.
It is available to all of us. You don’t have to take it from someone in order to harness it, and when you share it, it multiplies.
When you have the power to act upon your reality with the intention of a positive impact, it becomes a part yourself. This means that no one can take it away from you once you have it.
No one but yourself.
Ease the pain.
And desperation also.
It have always worked. That is why marketers have always looked for pain points in their target. It is effective and efficient. It also gives companies and people a sense of purpose.
Today, however, pain and desperation has never been so tangible. People is, unfortunately, thinking about it in a daily basis. And that is not good for anyone, not even those who aren’t feeling ill.
And the amount of people feeling down, sad or anxious has never been so huge. We all are in this together. All of the 7 billion on the planet are facing the same predicament, even if a few are entertaining conspiracy theories.
So you see, the market is all of us. The business opportunities are endless. And humanity is desperate need of new and better ways of existence.
The world we go back in a few weeks will be transformed. The seed of change has been planted and it came in the shape of a sphere with antennas.
I wish I was talking about an alien spaceship. Unfortunately it is not as majestic as a flying saucer descending from the skies. It came in a much smaller vessel: the Corona Virus.
Much has been said about the pandemic. Where it came from, how it spreads and how fatal it can be. Here i’m interested in imagining the world when this is all “over”. It won’t ever be over, but at least, when the storm has passed and the virus becomes part of our daily lives.
Social, labor, economics, learning, and hopefully government will all be changed forever.
Are you, as individual, in position to become part of the forces that will drive this change? How would you imagine your participation? Is it active or passive? Is it designing new ways of social interaction or deciding where not to take your money? Have you ever thought about it? Do you even care?
Just think that in our day to day, small, trivial decisions, we decide the world we create for ourselves for those around us. So tiny as a drop of water digging a hole in the rock, yet so powerful to shape our future.
“I think we should reschedule all of our home tasks and errands.” I confidently said to my wife. Her distrustful look and the smirk told me I was, maybe, walking on thin ice. I decided to leave the subject.
Just a few days later she sent me the link to an article about organizing home office, home school and everything else at home.
She had read it . She said I should read it.
So I did. It suggested we should relax some standards we abide ourselves to. We should move some priorities, etc. We did, things has been working out better.
So you see, people could hear some fact or advise and their minds might discard it. It depends on how biased you think the other party is. Also depends on the moment you are going through. But the funny thing is that our brains will give so much more authority to a written text than to spoken word.
Just by reading something that before you understood intuitively, it suddenly seems so obvious, so revealing. Like it always should have been this clear.
So use it in your own favor. Set your goals. Write them. Make a plan. Write it. Have a schedule. Write it.
And also if you have someone to persuade, find some texts written by someone else or even write them yourself. It might just be the tipping point of their view of the world.
To think that everything will remain bad if you are feeling bad at this very moment.
It is also easy to think that everything will be ok when you are feeling ok.
We are so biased. The present has a huge impact in or projections of the future. People tend to be much more optimistic when feeling happy, even if some scientist showed them a few videos of babies panda. And as well, we are pessimistic if at the moment we’re felling the blues.
That is why is so important to learn to detach ourselves from the context, what sourrounds us, whatever happen to us, and control our reactions so we may se more clearly the future. If that is possible this day and age…
Just keep breathing my friends.
And I mean there is no certain tomorrow. At least for 99% of us.
There is no discernible future. There is no short term. So we must do the best out of today and a few more days ahead of us.
How do you plan in times like this? How do you maintain a sense of what is right about the direction of your life and business?
When you must throw away huge beautiful dreams so you survive the next few weeks, all your frameworks, all your methods and assumptions are obsolete.
A new reality, one that keeps changing every week or so, calls for fast paced adaptations. More than ever we must unlearn over and over so we may remain sane.
To cope with the fatal loss of goals we must set new ones in never ending iterations. But goals are not the goal. Keep moving is the name of the game.
Sometimes it takes all your strength just to keep holding on. And for now, that is fine.