The habit of doing one’s duty drives away fear. Charles Baudelaire
Many of our fears stem from our tardy and lethargic behavior which results in us postponing our work, avoiding work and taking our duties casually. As a result suddenly the piled up work, the extensive rework that we have to do and the unavoidable deadlines that loom in front of us frighten us and the resultant stress and tensions scare us even more. When one objectively looks at the situation we make the startling realization that most of our fears are self created and possibly completely avoidable if only we were more diligent and hardworking.
Very often our problem of doing our duty efficiently emits from the uncomfortable and painful realty, that we don’t even know what our exact duties are. This is partly due to us being haphazard by nature but largely due to being ill organized and unplanned when getting to work. The way out is to take time out and attempt to clarify to ourselves what are the key jobs that we must do and ideally we must have fixed time frames to finish of the tasks. It also helps tremendously if we can prioritize our duties so that we cover all of them efficiently.
The next most common problem relates to our work style and our habit of putting off unpleasant tasks. We will stall, delay, attempt to avoid, try and delegate, deny, refuse or ignore those tasks that in our view are unpleasant and unappreciated. Conveying bad news for example is the least favored duty anyone fancies. Remember the time when we got a bad progress report card in school and we worried sick the whole night about the consequences. We muster courage to show it to our parent just a minute before leaving for school in the fond hope that tempers will cool down by evening. We actually end up getting a triple whammy for we are berated for trying to hide the report card, then for the poor performance and we have already spend a whole night in tossing and turning and visualizing the most frightening consequences.
Perhaps our own work ethics creates the maximum problem for us. Sheer laziness and tardiness accounts for the bulk of the problem related to our abjecting our duties. . This followed closely by our personal weakness of being meticulous to a fault in doing ordinary tasks or completely casual and irresponsible when having to do important and critical tasks. On one hand one may spend hours on sprucing up our homes to receive an important visitor but at the same time we may conveniently put of deadline bound tasks like paying bills or filing the tax returns since there may be provisions to pay a fine to make up. In effect our style of work puts mental pressure on us for we are most worried about how the guests will react to the house despite our best efforts and at the same time dread paying the whopping fines for not paying dues on time; the bottom line is that we still do not change.
Remember: Excellence begins when you go beyond the call of duty.
Try this:
- What do you consider as your 3 primary duties to the following people?
- Your parents
- Your spouse
- Your children
- Your friends
- Your society at large
- List out the following
- Apart from the daily chores what are the 3 duties that you have to do at least once weekly for the family
- What are those 3 duties which you know will make you worried if you do not perform them on time?
- List out 3 tasks that you hate to do and examine how you handle to tasks when they occur.
This post is courtesy www.actspot.com
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