Strategies for a Better Work Experience: Consider Your Work-Related Goals

This is Part 2 in the Aim & Conquer series "Strategies for a Better Work Experience." See Part 1 here.

Goals are important for ensuring that you invest your time, energy, and attention in ways that are meaningful to you. The outcomes that are sought are selected by you because of the significance that you believe they will have in your life. Over time, as you deepen your understanding of what achievements are truly fulfilling for you, your goals can evolve to better align with the pursuits that allow you to make your greatest contributions to yourself, those you love, and life as a whole.

Most work-related goals tend towards the long-term. They might involve joining a certain company ... reaching a certain title level ... earning certain compensation ... or reaching a certain business performance target. These can be supportive goals, but the extended time horizons over which they occur, combined with the lack of full control over the outcomes, can make it difficult to tangibly connect with them on a day-to-day basis.

It can be beneficial to set and pursue work-related goals that are more short-term in nature. These goals need not be related to the completion of external tasks. Most people are already relatively skilled at carrying out the duties that their jobs require, and they are usually inclined to devote a substantial amount of attention to those responsibilities.

It is in the area of short-term, work-related, internal goals that an increased investment of resources can pay dividends. What standards do you set for how you are going to engage your work from day to day, week to week, and so on? What are you aiming for on the inside? How do you monitor your progress? How often do you evaluate what is and isn’t working, identify potentially beneficial changes, and pledge to test them out with focus and sincerity?

"Process” and “outcome” do not have to be definitively separated. An intense level of awareness of how you are being on the inside ... while you are pursuing goals on the outside ... can help you shift from an orientation of “sacrificing the present to achieve in the future” to one that is more connected to the reality of the moment.

In this section, Aim & Conquer offers three strategies to support you in examining your work-related goals:

• Start with More Joy
• Establish Internal Working Conditions
• Produce Meaningful Results

Enjoy!

Start with More Joy 

As it relates to work, many people have ideas about situations they would rather be in than the ones they are actually in. When this is the case, the starting point is already limiting the enjoyment that is possible. Waking up each day and holding even a slight sense of "I wish my work situation were different" can create an internal division by undervaluing the reality that is being experienced in favor of something that is imagined, and perhaps even vague or undefined. It sets up a conflict where the actuality of your day can never be experienced with true appreciation, because it will always be judged as suboptimal.

The starting point matters. If you have ideas that position what you are doing as not being “enough,” then it can be easy to end up in a place where you feel a degree of animosity towards the work that you do. With the right stresses ... a heavy workload ... an inconsiderate boss ... an ineffective colleague ... your thoughts and emotions can build momentum in a direction that sabotages your well-being.

This is not to say that people should avoid having aspirations for betterment in relation to aspects of their work experience. It is, in fact, very productive to desire to continue to develop and achieve at increasing levels. What is critical is that these motivations are not used as a source of comparison to the present reality in ways that stoke unchecked internal negativity. That outcome can be avoided by connecting with a deep sense of gratitude for what does actually exist in your life.

In other words ... you control your frame of reference. The more you can train your internal self to express the qualities you appreciate as a baseline, the easier it is to breathe, smile, and look forward to what’s ahead of you.

The key step, then, is to identify the starting point. How joyful is it? How resilient is it? If uncontrollable things go against what you desire, to what degree are you able to stabilize your joy? Can you maintain it for weeks, months, and years at a time without requiring extended vacations or sabbaticals to recover?

Grounding yourself in such a starting point takes conscious effort. You have to pay attention to how you start each day and each week. You have to eliminate the rogue ideas floating in your head that, directly or indirectly, harm your energy. You have to learn to clear whatever unsupportive emotions are happening inside of you so that you can establish a connection to a fundamental love for your life.

Establish Internal Working Conditions

The phrase “working conditions” has been around since at least the Industrial Revolution. Broadly, the term refers to the environment and circumstances impacting the experience of work, including the duration ... the intensity ... the health risks ... the code of conduct governing interactions ... the compensation structure and terms ... and much more. For decades, workers have sought to improve their external working conditions, often through the formation of unions, by standing up for changes they believe are achievable and in their best interest.

This background can serve as a parallel for the concept of “internal” working conditions. In the same way that there is an external environment influencing the experience of work, there is an internal environment that plays a significant role in how it “feels” to go through your workday. Its levels of cleanliness, respect, courtesy, liveliness, connectivity, and accountability, among other qualities, can be the difference between a work experience that is joyful and sustainable and one that is miserable and draining.

Perhaps the most fundamental driver of the nature of one’s internal work experience is way in which exchanges happen and are interpreted. At the highest level, people exchange their internal resources like time, energy, and attention for some sort of value, often in the form of money or recognition. This foundational transaction sets up the possibility of a never-ending effort to “win” the trade by investing less energy and/or gaining more value.

Such a dynamic is, to some degree, inevitable whenever the individual worker feels a sense of “lack” on the inside. If time, energy, and attention are deemed “limited resources,” then the worker will seek to optimize the way in which they are used. Suddenly, attending meetings which are deemed “unnecessary” can be a source of boredom ... completing a task that is deemed “irrelevant” can be a source of frustration ... and not receiving a promotion or a pay raise that is deemed to be “deserved” can set off a whole chain of toxic internal reactions. All of this stems from a perspective in which “giving” ... of one’s own energy, to an external activity ... is done in order to “get.”

It is possible to choose, instead, a perspective of “giving” in order to “give.” In such an approach, the focus is on appreciating the resources of time, energy, and attention with which you have been blessed, and which you have been given the opportunity to deploy in whatever ways you desire. If you have chosen to perform a certain job, then you have decided to contribute the resources you’ve been given in that particular manner, and it is in your interest to celebrate that decision rather than generate any negativity against it.

All of this is to say ... you are the CEO who gets to set your internal working conditions. You get to lay out the rules about where you work, when you work, and how you work. You get to direct the resources that have been given to you by life. If the way you have chosen to do so regularly results in an internal environment that is unpleasant or less than what you would like it to be, then it is within your power to enact whatever changes are in your best interest.

Produce Meaningful Results

Most people are well-oriented towards producing results in the external world. This is especially true as it relates to work, where it is relatively straightforward to define results that are “meaningful” as those that contribute to business performance. The more that workers drive growth ... profitability ... customer satisfaction ... efficiency and effectiveness of operations ... employee satisfaction ... and other beneficial changes to fundamental business aspects, the more meaningful their contributions are to company performance.

In some ways, the game of “work” is similar to the game of “school,” in that there are very clear numbers around which to optimize. Most people are taught, from a young age, about the process of taking particular actions in order to influence specific external outcomes (e.g., grades), and those teachings continue to influence them throughout their professional careers. It is relatively natural to focus on meeting the expectations of one’s boss, producing the deliverables for which one is responsible, and having supportive conversations with one’s colleagues.

What is less natural is to focus on producing meaningful results on the inside while achieving all of those outcomes on the outside. To illustrate the point, take a moment to consider the meaningful results you are currently seeking to realize internally. What are those results? What steps are you taking to actualize them? How often are you successful? What are your most common obstacles, and how do you respond to them?

Most workers would agree that, in an ideal world, they’d experience a higher degree of joy, aliveness, and ease as they progress through their workdays. There may be some who would aim to be more present, more connected to a sense of purpose or meaning, or more self-aware. In all cases, the pursuit of such outcomes can benefit from a commitment to better planning, focus, intensity, and resilience ... qualities that are widely acknowledged to facilitate accomplishments in the external world ... in relation to whatever results are sought internally. The challenge lies in applying those qualities on the inside as regularly as they are applied on the outside.

The benefit of such application is that you can develop a skillset which travels with you regardless of the job, or, more broadly, the situation, you find yourself in. In other words, you’re training your ability to ensure internal “success” no matter what happens externally. You recognize your power to guarantee desirable outcomes in the dominion of life over which you have 100% control, and you gradually level up to be able to deliver independently of the challenges the world brings your way.

How would your experience of life be different if you devoted as much time, energy, and attention to producing meaningful results on the inside as you do for those on the outside? Work is not just the only lens with which to view this question. For example, you could examine whether, when it comes to supporting growth, you meet the standards of being a “good coach” to yourself on the inside as much as you aim to be one to those you care about outside of you.

Conclusion

As you consider your work-related goals, consider the following strategies:

• Start with More Joy
• Establish Internal Working Conditions
• Produce Meaningful Results

Best of luck!

Continue on to Part 3 in this series