Welcome to the February edition of The Inbox Coach. This month I want to challenge your assumptions on what hard work looks like and instead ask the question, how can we approach our career development with ease?
I’m not afraid of hard work. I love taking on a new challenge and putting myself outside of my comfort zone, because I know how good it feels to achieve something you have been working hard for.
What I don’t enjoy is things being unnecessarily difficult. The concept of ease is something I’ve been thinking about for several years now, both from observing how my clients think but also through having coaching myself. I’ve been asking myself a lot, “how can I set myself up so that doing hard work is something I do with ease?”
When things get in the way
Do you ever sit down to do a task only to find you don’t have the tools you need, your workspace is a mess, you’ve already procrastinated for days, you are over thinking what to do and the fear of failure has left you unable to even figure out where to start? Before you’ve even got down to the task at hand you are exhausted from all this additional and unnecessary work you have created for yourself. Career development tasks are often already hard. We all have busy work and home lives, so finding time to work on ourselves is difficult enough but add to that the challenges that come with learning something new or stepping outside your comfort zone, you really don’t need to make things even harder for yourself.
The physical challenges that get in the way of our development are often the easier of the two to sort out. The patterns of thinking around our development can be harder to notice and to change. I’m a very logical person who loves a plan and I don’t like doing things last minute, but I have spectacular procrastination skills.
No pain, no gain
As a society we have built up an association between hard work and success. To be successful, you have to work hard. Whilst I don’t disagree with the idea that you need to put in the work, I think we have missed the subtly that not all hard work has the same value. If something is difficult, it could be because it is new and challenging or it could be that there are lots of things getting in the way of you being able to do the work. When we are working away at our goals, it can be easy to not see the difference between those two challenges and spend time and energy on things which aren’t really helping. Think what I could do if I had spent all the time I had procrastinated on doing activities that were developing me in my career!
Doing something with ease doesn’t mean it is easy, that it isn’t challenging, it’s about removing all unnecessary friction so that you can dedicate your time and energy to developing your skills and experience. I also think we have a problem with the idea that you could develop in your career, and it not feel hard. That if something comes with ease, it can’t possibly mean that you have worked for it. I want to challenge that idea because I think when we are working with ease, we can actually do more, take on more challenges and feel better in the process.
Reflection
*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add this email to your calendar
To find ease in your career development you first have to decide that it is possible and then you have to pay attention to what is getting in your way. As I say all the time, we are all unique. What is a challenge for me might be easy for you, so I can’t tell you how you will experience ease or what your challenges are. What I can do is help you to reflect on your situation and work that out for yourself. To find ease in your work try asking yourself these questions…
When do you feel most at ease at work?
What are the conditions that are met to help you feel this way?
When do you feel that you struggle to work with ease?
What are the barriers that get in the way of you working with ease?
How would it feel to work with ease on something that you find challenging?
By thinking about when you are working with ease and when you are experiencing friction and challenge, it can help you to identify what is getting in your way.
Action
There will be moments in your day when you are working with complete ease, others which are a painful struggle and many more somewhere in between. If you can work out what is going on in each of these situations, then you can start to change the things that aren’t serving you.
Task
When you feel like you are working with ease or when you are struggling, keep a note of what you are noticing. How you are feeling? What thoughts you are having? See if you can spot any patterns about how you behave when you are working with ease and when you aren’t.
Inspiration
“You don’t discover your own gardening potential until you have gardenable space of your own.” - Penelope Lively
Doing work with ease is all about setting yourself up with the conditions you need to do your best work. It is about removing the barriers, physical or mental, that get in your way so that rather than forcing the work you can just get on with it. I’ve talked before about the parallels between plants and gardening and career development. Plants thrive under certain conditions and if those are not met, they wither and die. A good gardener knows what conditions a plant needs to thrive and plants them in a spot that is going to meet those needs.
In Life in the Garden by Penelope Lively, the author uses fictional gardens as prompts to consider what gardens mean to people and why they garden. I was drawn to it because it has the most beautiful cover of illustrated plants and I have not been disappointed by what was inside. This quote comes from the introduction of the book. We cannot know our potential for anything until we are able to try it out. Working with ease is something that we can only get better at with practice. You can find out more about Penelope Lively and her book here.
The days are getting longer, and it isn’t quite so dark at 5pm, but February can still feel like a tough month. Spring is on its way, but it isn’t quite here yet and with all that has gone on over the last two years it can feel like a lot. I hope that this theme of ease helps you to find a lightness to your work over the coming month and, perhaps, even help you to approach your career development with excitement and joy.
I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on creating ease in your work
See you then
Laura
P.S. I’ve listed all the previous editions of The Inbox Coach emails on my website which you can find here. Each email has reflection questions and action tasks, so if you need to revisit a topic you can now browse them all in one place
