Five juicy, strategic reflections to get your work-life-mission back on track.
With Thanksgiving giving a 4-day holiday, you may have found yourself with more time for reflection than you’ve had for a long while. That reflection may have shown you’re a high performer, i.e. also, an over-worker, over-giver, and card-carrying intense, dedicated, passionate employee who gives their all to making the company great.
That’s fantastic — and in fact, the world needs us, and needs more people like us.
But it’s also not fantastic — in that you may realize you’ve been caught up in the completely captivating, sleepwalking flow of daily urgencies over the past months such that it’s been an overwhelming wave, constantly occupying your waking, sleeping, evening, and weekend hours with thoughts of all you need and want to achieve in the workplace and the avalanche of duties that regularly pile onto your desk.
The problem with sleepwalking is that it carries you along in its tidelike flow, while your real dreams and desires get pushed to the background for weeks, months, years… or forever. You get the picture.
As always, I am an advocate of bringing your best to the workplace. None of my healing advice for Wounded Professionals or High Performers concerns slacking off or underperforming. At the same time I know, and have worked with, the intensity of that drive to outperform others that can lead to you sacrificing yourself to meet daily fires in a chronic 24/7/365 cycle, when in fact, you really need to step back before you go off that cliff.
The world needs High Performers, visionaries, leaders, and innovators. But too often, by our very nature, we are caught up in the cogs of making it “work” for our organization to the detriment of our larger mission in life. Click to Tweet.
It's time to change that. Here are some strategic questions you can reflect on over the holiday season. Get out your favorite journaling modality, schedule some quiet time, grab a cup of coffee or tea, and dig into these juicy reflections with the goal of improving your work-life-mission experience.
Work-Life-Mission for High Performers - Questions for Reflection
Where am I overworking, overgiving, and in general, overly being the Good Soldier who takes on not only my own major projects, but everyone else’s problems in my work role because as a High Performer, I’m the best at solving them? How is this working out for me? What's this doing to my passion for work? What is this calling into my life as I live in this way? What's this doing to my mission? My talents? My growth? My health?
Am I merely living in survival mode, in instinct mode, trying to meet the impossible daily demands that have come to me in my work role? Is this impacting my ability to put time and energy toward the fantastic growth I'm really able to achieve with my rock-star skills? Why am I letting this happen? What reasons do I have, or excuses am I making, that continue to allow this to occur?
Looking back at the past months and year, to what extent have I “sleepwalked” through this entire time, driven by resolving the day-to-day urgencies of my employer without regard for my own future as a High Performer? How much time slipped away while I did that? Am I going to let this happen going forward?
What are the things I will do about this in the real world and the work world, right here, right now? Write out a list of 5 mindset shifts, 5 actions you'll change, and 5 attitudes toward your work, that you will change to stop the sleepwalking and lean in to your potential - today!
If I do not do these things, how much of my true potential will I allow to be wasted over time? Where will I be in 6 months? At this exact same time next year, wondering where the year went? If I do not do this, what will my future really be like? Where will I end up if I only ever spend my days embroiled in putting out fires?
The World Needs High Performers
The world needs us as High Performers. We're the visionaries, leaders, innovators and multi-role experts who can take organizations farther than they ever thought possible. But too often, by our very nature, we are caught up in the cogs of making it “work” for our organization to the detriment of our larger mission in life.
Step back, take a look, and take action so that you don’t waste your own self. Divert some of that high energy/high skill toward your growth today. Change a mindset, change a delegation pattern, change the extra hours you’re giving away for free, change checking your email all weekend getting that extra jump on people who aren’t, change working all weekend long to catch up…. change.
If you're also within a chaotic workplace, you might further enjoy these thoughts from Rodger Dean Duncan in this article from Forbes magazine, "Chaos At Work? You Can Learn To Manage It".
By getting out of the sleepwalking, by staying true to your mission, you actually increase your level of workplace satisfaction. That makes you a better High Performer for your organization as you strategize to give more of what you're best at, in creating more of what your organization needs.
And, you're also more able to assess where your current role is in its lifecycle with you, and look strategically toward the future as to whether your current role will still be serving you in the year or years to come. That makes you a better High Performer for yourself as you craft your role and contribution to the world.
What will you change, right now, today?
Let the answer surprise, delight, and empower you as you #healworklife.
