Do your best

Nothing of worthy or weight can be achieved with half a mind, with a faint heart, and with a lame endeavor. Isaac Barrow

Observe children playing and you will notice, that they are enjoying with gay abandon their pursuits. If we analyze this phenomenon, you will realize that it is not just that they are doing what they like best, but giving of their best in the process and this is what doubles their joy and triples their fun. Examine our daily routine, and you will be hard pressed to find that sort of gay abandon in your routine. If you do a clinical examination of your day, it is possible that you will discover some interesting facets that you were blissfully unaware, that camouflaged your efforts from being truly satisfying and rewarding. (Before you read on, can you pause and take a pen and paper and attempt to retrace the activities of the previous two days of your life, putting it into hourly slots?)

If you have the list ready, carefully analyze it and mark out which activities and how many hours of the day gave you 100% satisfaction. Continue this analysis for 75% -50%-25%-1% and then ask yourself; what was the difference between the activity that gave you over 75% happiness and satisfaction and the one on the lower end of the scale. How many of the activities were initiated by you. How many of them were forced on to you. How of them were unavoidable? What were those activities that you did for yourself/ your family/ your friends & colleagues/ your company/ job specific etc. Can you see any correlation between activities initiated by you and higher satisfaction or activities done for yourself and family / friends and higher satisfaction? The converse must be true for the other activities.

The learning’s from the analyses done would give us the following points.

When we do things that we like or what we volunteer for or what motivates us, we are willing to give our 100% to that activity. Since we cannot always do what we like nor commit too much time volunteering, we need to motivate ourselves to perform a good job when there are tasks that are to be undertaken by compulsion.
The routine is invariably boring since it is often repetitive and has limited scope for variety. You need to be creative in tackling such tasks. Creativity can take many forms, from visualizing the task in a different way to tackling the job in a unique way or exploring alternatives to simplifying the task etc.
Occasionally we get overwhelmed by the scope of the tasks on hand. This results in what we call paralysis by analysis, wherein we keep studying the task but not beginning it. The net result is procrastination and the hope is that the task will get solve over time. In reality, the criticality of the task gets increases, your anxiety levels o up and the possibility of failure keeps looming threatingly. The cure to this is to START. (See the post in our weekly blog www.poweract.blogspot.com on Simply Trigger Actionable Results Today)
We also, if we are very honesty to ourselves, realize that our personal weakness plays a critical role in poor performance. That is when we make half hearted attempts, display a shallow temperament, find excuses to justify failure, pass on blame etc. The remedy is to address the personal weakness and fortify yourself by academic inputs/ openness to feedback/ getting professional help by way of counseling or attending specialized training like Personality Development or Effective Communication Skills

Remember: To tell yourself ‘I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination’

Try These:

In your daily chores / routine there would be many tasks that you fin hard to do or dislike. List out 2-5 such tasks. Now make a special effort to objectively look at each task and make 3-5 points on how you can get yourself motivated to do the task, Alternatively how can you circumvent the task or delegate it officially.( This is not avoiding the task but handing over the task to someone more competent or more interested or more prepared to do it)
What are those tasks that you love to do? Are there ways to improve upon it? Can you add more value to it? Are there other tasks that you can club with it so that the net outcome is even better than the two tasks being done independently? What is it that motivates you in doing these tasks? Are there other tasks that you can take on based on similar motivational factors being present in those tasks?

This post is courtesy www.actspot.com.

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