Strategies for a Better Work Experience: Incorporate Feedback and Adjustments

Aim & Conquer Strategic Insights for a Better Work Experience Feedback and Adjustments

This is Part 3 in the Aim & Conquer series "Strategies for a Better Work Experience." See Part 1 here.

Changing patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior is rarely easy, especially if those patterns have been reinforced over a period of time. At some point, the repetitive nature of stimulus-response becomes ingrained to such a degree that people aren’t even able to distinguish the specific choices they are making. Something happens externally and, as if it were programmed to be, a set of internal conditions is rapidly generated.

This is often true in relation to aspects of one’s work. On a regular basis, triggers of varying immediacy and intensity can prompt undesirable experiences on the inside. Your boss could ignore you or cut you off in the middle of a comment. A colleague could pile work on you without any degree of consideration or gratitude. More broadly, you could find yourself consistently dissatisfied with what it feels like to go through your day or your week.

When these situations arise, they can have a negative impact on the degree of looseness and adaptability on your interior. Your emotions ... anger, sadness, and so on ... can accumulate in unhealthy ways. Your thoughts might trend toward judgment and criticism. You might feel torn about the best way to express yourself and "move" those sentiments through your being, with one part of you wanting to communicate what you are going through, another part worried about the potential consequences of such an expression, a third part wondering whether anything good could potentially arise from doing so, and so on.

Often, these types of experiences gradually become “part of the job,” things that are seen as inherent to the process of work. Allowing some version of this perspective to take hold can increase the likelihood that one's feelings of discontent persist. Blame can be generated in relation to whoever is deemed to be acting “inappropriately,” according to one’s point of view. The cycle of “less-than-idealness” continues.

Such an approach is suboptimal. Though driving a change in the behavior of colleagues or in the underlying rituals of one’s company may be possible, it is certainly more difficult than driving a change in the way one processes a particular experience on the inside. This is not to say that individuals should abandon attempts to drive higher-quality interactions and principles within a business, and it is not to condone expressions by others that are disrespectful. It is to say that, in all cases, including those where others act improperly, individuals can find benefit by acknowledging their own ability to respond in ways that are more supportive internally.

What are the disappointments and frustrations that you feel on a somewhat regular basis in relation to your work? What are the underlying patterns governing the way you interpret those events? To what degree do your interpretations empower you to take action in a way that stimulates energy and ease? How agile have you become in navigating challenging interactions that would have tripped you up in the past?

Examining yourself at a deep level ... gaining feedback on how you are choosing to respond to various situations ... assessing the impact of those particular responses ... and “breaking the pattern” in pursuit of more desirable internal results is a process that you can commit time to in order to promote improvement.

In this section, Aim & Conquer offers three strategies to support you in making beneficial adjustments:

Acknowledge Other Possibilities
Own Your Responsibility
Expand Your Capability

Enjoy!

Acknowledge Other Possibilities

When it comes to understanding all that is happening in any situation in life, human beings face a number of challenges, because there are many ways in which information transfer is always incomplete. Consider an example in which Person A communicates something to Person B. The collective sense of what Person A expresses ... in words, tone, cadence, body language, micro-expressions, and more ... can never fully represent the totality of what Person A is experiencing. On top of that, when Person B perceives what Person A is communicating, he or she does so using a set of senses ... sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and others ... that is relatively narrow and that constrains what can be gathered. Finally, using an often-unclear set of past experiences as a framework, Person B evaluates the data that has been collected, translates that data into a limited set of words, and assigns a uniquely personal meaning to those words.

Overall, it is an imperfect process.

And yet, it is common for people to exhibit a high degree of confidence in the accuracy of their interpretations. Something happens, and it is easy to develop a level of certainty about what exactly that “something” is. It is true that areas of life require an amount of "conclusiveness" in order to function, but it can also be helpful to recognize the lack of clarity that surrounds any particular internal “verdict.”

All of this is to say that, at work, it can be beneficial to re-examine any “understandings,” “facts,” “truths,” or “realities” that you have defined in a fixed manner. Interpretations that are rigid can reduce internal levels of visibility and adaptability. It is like your awareness runs into a wall ... you can’t see past it, and mobility in relation to it decreases.

When your awareness is blunted, you receive less feedback. Your agility to shift and adapt, from a mental-emotional perspective, becomes constrained, so it's more difficult to make the adjustments that are required to keep progressing towards the internal results that you find most meaningful.

With regard to your company ... your job ... your boss ... your colleagues ... your direct reports ... and other dimensions of your work experience ... what are the conclusions that you’ve reached? How have you come to believe that other people perceive you? How do you perceive other people? Which of those conclusions and perceptions are adversely impacting your levels of enthusiasm and joy? To what degree would you be willing to sacrifice your certainty if it opened up the possibility of a more satisfying work experience?

There is always more to what is happening than what can be concluded about it. By accepting this sentiment, you can give yourself space to transition from a position that is “stuck” to one that has the potential to be “unstuck.”

Own Your Responsibility

Often, work feels draining rather than energizing. The more time people spend working, and the longer they engage in repetitive workdays and work-weeks, the less enthusiasm they might find themselves generating for their moment-to-moment experiences of work.

Sometimes, this leads to big-picture changes, perhaps in one’s role, one’s company, one’s location, or one’s industry. Sometimes, it leads to an acceptance of a “less-than-ideal” work experience.

In both of these cases, what is often under-examined is the importance of what is happening for people on the inside. Big-picture changes might resolve some issues in the short-term, but they do not result in any meaningful internal transformations. The same is true when people decide to accept less than what they desire. Regardless of whether things look different externally, many of the foundational drivers of the quality of one's work experience can remain unchanged over long periods of time.

Those drivers are related to the relationship that people have with their work. In the same way that relationships with other people require investment, commitment, and resilience in order to produce beneficial results, one’s relationship with work must be actively managed in order to ensure it is healthy and rewarding.

How present are you when you engage your work? How does that evolve over various periods of time? How do you schedule your days, weeks, months, and years to ensure you have a balance of “me time” and “work time” that can sustain your energy level? How do you guard against generating internal negativity as a result of the interactions and expectations your work brings to you?

If you are not regularly maintaining a high degree of self-awareness, it can be easy to, consciously or unconsciously, direct blame towards your company ... your job ... your colleagues ... or other external circumstances ... for whatever it is that you feel is lacking in your current experience of work. Even if what you are choosing to believe about your circumstances is defensible as “true,” if it is disempowering you from influencing your situation in a positive direction, then it is worth examining whether an alternative approach could generate more desirable results.

Owning your responsibility, in relation to work, is about exactly that. You acknowledge your ability to be purposeful in creating workdays, work-weeks, and, ultimately, a career that all energize you. For some people, it might be as easy as scheduling time into the day to breathe consciously and reconnect with what is happening inside so that they can release whatever toxicity or negativity has accumulated. For others, it might involve stretching, or moving, or listening to music.

For most, there will be opportunities to revisit their beliefs about work and see them more as “choices” rather than as hard-and-fast truths. Doing so creates the possibility of taking action in a supportive manner. At that point, the only things that can stop you are patterns of resistance that exist inside you, which are within your control to influence.

Expand Your Capability

Most people have fewer “new” experiences as they age. Conclusions are reached regarding the “best,” “most convenient,” or “most preferred” ways to go about a wide range of activities, including eating, sleeping, exercising, practicing personal hygiene, managing money, connecting with loved ones, recharging, analyzing and approaching specific situations, regulating emotions, communicating, and so much more. From that point onwards, the enormous variety available within life tends to shrink and congregate around one’s set of personal judgments.

Countering such an evolution requires effort, and it can be challenging to do so on the margins when a certain, comfortable outcome must seemingly be risked for an uncertain, potentially uncomfortable one. “Why take a chance?” the rationale goes. “Why expend effort for something that could end up being less desirable?”

By definition, personal growth requires a willingness to experience something that is, to some degree, unknown to you. What is difficult is valuing that reality over the certainty and comfort that is available as an alternative. The risk ... the sacrifice based on faith ... can seem daunting.

This is often the case at work. People come to see themselves as having certain capabilities and not others. They see their companies, and their colleagues, as being receptive to certain things and not others. Certain beliefs, and patterns of thinking and working, fall within the “generally accepted” guidelines, and others do not. The net effect is a significant reduction the scope of expressions that people deem possible, and an even more significant reduction in the scope of expressions that people see as being potentially worthwhile.

It is important to say here that there are clearly very many expressions which have no place in a safe, healthy working environment. The point is that there are many expressions which do have a place, but which are denied by workers because of the conclusions they’ve reached about what’s “best,” “most convenient,” or “most preferred.”

Doing things differently than you’ve done them in the past can be uncomfortable, especially when those things occur in front of others who might not be forgiving in their judgments. Still, if the range of expressions you grant yourself is limited, internally you will be more likely to experience boredom (from repetition), frustration (from being constrained), and stagnation (from a lack of newness).

Expanding your capability is about developing a willingness to go beyond your current boundaries, both internally and externally, to explore. In doing so, you can deepen your courage, find greater self-confidence and self-respect, and discover previously unknown skills. You can generate a broader toolkit for handling any challenges that arise, and you can facilitate an evolution towards outcomes that are of a higher caliber than those you are currently experiencing.

If you are unhappy with long and/or inefficient hours, see what happens if you take proactive steps to reduce them while still fulfilling what is asked of you. If you believe there are certain things that would help the business but that aren’t being done, see what happens if you communicate them in a well-considered and respectful manner. Whatever it is that you have “given up hope” on, devise a plan that is sincere and well-intentioned, and take a swing. The sheer act of doing so will promote freedom and growth within you.