When You Want To Give Up
After I discovered the power of mission at work, I expected things to be different. I didn't expect parades or ice cream, but I expected a new sense of purpose. I expected to arrive at the beginning of my day with excitement and to leave with a sense of contented exhaustion. The universe had other plans.
Our team of twelve people supported approximately eighty custom-built web applications. At the same time, we interviewed people who needed us to do new work for them at the rate of about one project every couple of weeks. When room opened in our schedule, we took on a new project and added to the number of applications we supported.
Because I was involved in almost every part of this process at the beginning of my coaching experience, I was using a program to keep track of all the things I was responsible for delivering. Every day, I would organize and prioritize enough work for an entire week and print it out on a single sheet of paper that I carried to every meeting. I called it The List. It was eight-and-a-half by eleven inches of beautifully color coded hell.
Naturally, I had some disempowering beliefs around The List. First, even though everything on The List was important, I considered most of the items interruptions. They were keeping me from getting to my really important project work. Second, I knew I would accomplish a lot by the end of the year, thanks to The List. Yet I wasn't sure any of it would be meaningful. Third, I felt work should be full of meaning, that if I loved what I was doing, it would never really feel like work. If it felt like work, I must be doing something wrong, or I was in the wrong job.
When I look back on this, it seems like a miracle that I was as successful as I was day after day. At the time, it felt as if I would never be done and that what I was doing was not good enough.
As in previous meetings with my coach, I was asked to consider new, empowering beliefs that would move me toward more empowered feelings about The List. This required me to do more than construct beliefs based on tricks of grammar and vocabulary stating the opposite of my unwanted beliefs. I had to step back and consider my work from a new perspective.
The List seemed to be about completing unrelated tasks. From my new perspective, I realized each task was part of something larger — something meaningful. My team had a mission. These tasks were part of achieving our mission. Anything that could not be traced back to our mission should be raised in a discussion with our manager. Maybe there was another team that ought to be working on these unrelated tasks.
I also uncovered the belief that my success was not measured in the length of The List. Success was measured by how many people I helped and how many things I completed. At the time, it felt as if I was playing mind games and trying to convince myself of something that was not necessarily true. Today, I realize I have a lot more input into what defines success for me than I ever thought. We all do. That is the topic of another article.