The meaning of success and failure
I’ve learned that most of us go through life without giving a lot of thought to how we define “success” and “failure.” I certainly never gave much thought to it for many years. It seemed like common sense to aim for the former and try to avoid the latter. However, I’ve found that how we relate to the concepts of success, excellence, mistakes, and failures makes a big difference for how we relate to work and life. It can mean the difference between feeling beleaguered and defeated or feeling deeply curious, open to learning, and genuinely engaged. Exploring our assumptions about these things can help open up possibilities for satisfaction, innovation, and true learning.
Our relationship to our academic and professional work
Most of us may not have thought much about having a relationship with our work, but, whether we are a CEO, researcher, supervisor, staff member, student, or self-employed, it turns out that most of us have one. That relationship might be mostly positive, negative, or a mixture. And, as is true of a relationship with another person, our relationship with our work can be complicated--it can be fraught with intense meanings and feelings, many of which are long-standing and involve assumptions, hopes, thoughts, and feelings. Sometimes what appears to be simple stuckness, resistance, boredom, or even laziness turns out to have more to do with how we relate to the work. But, perhaps even more than an interpersonal relationship, our relationship to our work is amenable to change – we can take steps to make work less stressful and more invigorating, meaningful, and productive.
Procrastination
Many of us procrastinate. Or at least we think we do. We aim to finish something by a certain time, and we don’t do it. Maybe we don't even start. Some see that kind of thing as a failure of will or a reflection of a character flaw, like laziness. But I don’t think any of us is actually inherently lazy. We procrastinate for many reasons, some of them complex and reasonable. If procrastination were a simple thing, we would have fixed it long ago. The good news is that often our procrastination patterns are amenable to change.
Perfectionism
Why not aim high, right? Many of us assume that, in order to get great results, we should aim for perfection, or close to it. The best we can imagine. But, as many people know, that kind of perfectionistic goal often backfires. It can create blocks to working, actually making it harder to get good results. And it can even lead us to avoid working toward goals. Developing a more complex, more sophisticated relationship to our goals, while keeping standards high, can make a big difference in how we feel about our work and how much we can actually achieve.
Listening and responding
Much has been written about the importance of good communication and listening, but how do we really work on that? We usually don’t have much opportunity to carefully explore and practice taking others' perspectives, being a better listener, and effectively responding to others. Using real-life situations and step-by-step increases in difficulty, it’s possible to increase one’s skill and satisfaction at dealing with emotion, interpersonal tension and conflict.
Team building
Many of us know that it can take only one or two negative interactions to change the tone and effectiveness of a team. Even when we try hard to avoid team conflicts and difficulties, we can find ourselves affected by them. Yet we rarely have opportunities to meaningfully learn how to work well within teams. Through close consultation, skill-building, practice, and personal reflection, team members can learn to identify, articulate their own goals, and support one another’s, making for an overall stronger, safer, more satisfying team.
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