Career Goals and Stress: How to Achieve Goals and Maintain Your Sanity
“Resistance is the force that keeps us from taking positive action, choosing comfort and safety over challenge and growth.”
From my company web site: http://www.dandbconsulting.com/.
Many of us have difficulty doing what we should do rather than what we want to do. I have spent countless hours strategizing with clients on how to overcome their resistance to taking the positive action needed to move them forward. It helps to be highly motivated with a strong desire to achieve. But for the rest of us, grinding ahead through disappointments and navigating unchartered territory is a daily challenge.
You can work to conquer resistance by practicing the completion of small tasks that are uncomfortable for you. In that way you gradually develop the discipline and courage to complete the tasks that are critical to your success.
Motivation
I recently read a newspaper article about an author who has published two novels. He said that he is not sure how he was able to complete both books, but credited his family as his motivation to stay focused. It helps if all of us can reach deep down to find the motivating factor that can drive us forward.
Focus on Results
Get a Plan
It is very important that you have a comprehensive plan.
•What is it going to take to achieve your goals? Break down the process into parts.
•Determine priorities.
•Set goals and objectives with timelines and make a commitment to meet those timelines. The timelines then become self-imposed deadlines for task completion.
•If there are things that are particularly difficult for you, do them first thing in the morning. Resistance builds up as the day goes on.
•Set both daily and weekly goals for task completion that are challenging yet achievable.
•Make a commitment to yourself that you will complete all of items on your to do list every day.
•Work with someone for accountability. It can be a friend, partner, colleague or a coach.
•Keep a “stream of consciousness” daily journal, three pages in length, first thing in the morning. It will help to write about your frustrations and acknowledge successes.
•Allow yourself to celebrate small achievements!
it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.”
Christopher Parker
Addressing Resistance to Change
As a career consultant for the past 16 years, I listen to some clients express their desire for a “secure’ job with a “secure” organization. But an organization that doesn’t change is not going to survive, and there is no job security in the workplace.
There are three drivers of change in organizations: People, Technology and Information. These drivers constantly impact each other.
When your main motivator is to find a job with a good salary and benefits with an organization that will take care of you, you are not focusing on what you need to compete in today’s job market. It is not the organization’s role to take care of you; it is your role to help grow the organization, no matter what your functional area. Organizations do not exist to take care of employees. This is a critical lesson is today’s tight job market.
In order to survive in an organization experiencing change, you need to change with the pace of the organization. Individual resistance to change can sideline your career.
What you can do:
1. Get comfortable with change and accept it as new challenge.
2. Understand that the company will not make things easier for you, or relieve your stress.
3. Accept the change and move on. Whining and self-pity will only make your job more difficult.
4. Figure out how the game has changed and how priorities have shifted. Decide which aspects of your job requite your immediate focus.
5. Remember that low-stress organizations don’t exist. If they seem low stress it is only a temporary situation.
6. Don’t expend energy trying to influence matters that are beyond your influence. If they wanted your opinion, they would have asked for it.
7. Keep up with the pace of change.
8. Re-engineer your job and get rid of expendable activities.
9. Put your faith in action and maximize your productivity.
10. “Pick battles big enough to matter and small enough to win.”
Jonathan Kozol
11. Learn to live with and appreciate uncertainty.
12. Stretch yourself to learn new skills and take on new assignments
New skills and accomplishments are resume builders. The road to a continuous, uninterrupted work history is having updated, marketable skills.
13. Practice extreme self-care.
Exercise, meditate, connect with nature, sleep more, eat nutritious food, play, simplify your life.
I challenge everyone to consider the changes you are experiencing in your job and organization, and identify one thing you can do differently that will make a difference.
Debbie Brown
Executive Coaching 