Archive for September, 2011

Le Flou du More

September 16th, 2011



I owe the insight behind this blog to a coaching session I had a few weeks ago.


We often hear ourselves and others say “I am not happy with my job anymore. I can do more. I want more. More tasks, more responsibilities, more things to learn.” This, of course, comes with an amount of frustration.

Time goes by, we’re at a checkpoint again and more often than none, we find out that we’re unhappy with what we’ve achieved. We still want more. We still feel and believe we can do more. Even though, task-to-task, we might have taken on a considerable more.

At the recurrence of this incident some judge it a job or a job-circumstance issue and leave fleeing what they believe is their source of misery toward the greener other side. Having fled the wrong reasons, they do so only to find themselves, sooner than wished for, in the same place again. The difference of the décor and the cast don’t prevent the still sameness of feelings and thoughts.

How come? What makes this reemerge and what makes us repeatedly dissatisfied? Is it us? Is it the job? Is it the circumstances?

Let’s look in a different direction for a second. Some of you might recall the literature around structuring long-term plans into small, shorter-term objectives that pave the distance towards the farther goal with several closer achievables coupled with a win-ability aspect. Meaning: shorter-term objectives that would constitute, once achieved, small wins for the team marking its way to longer-term success. Of course, this strategy increases the agility of the project and the controllability of its results. Let alone this factor, the inherent motivation resulting from the celebration of those wins – be it explicit or not – is not to be taken lightly for the vital waves of boosts it supplies to the kinetic energy of the team and its individuals.

This being said, let’s go back to the “more” of the situation described earlier. In fact, “more” is vague. It is vague in such a way that fogs the measurability of its achievement. What follows is that by saying “I need more”, I have neither a visual representation of this increment nor an actual benchmark to measure my achievement against. So, even if I end up with more, I will not be able to feel the motivation of this win because I have not set to myself a goal that I can measure and hence celebrate and enjoy. That’s where the recurrence of frustration stems from. In contrast, if the definition of my objective is specific and elaborate (what tasks I want to add to mine, what additional responsibilities, what do I want to learn) then I can feel the joy of having achieved this increment and therefore experience the motivation that I deprived myself from in the first context. This means that instead of fleeing the wrong reasons, I could stay and learn to manage my motivation in this respect while keeping my head up and looking forward to growth.

That’s true at work and that’s true off work. Let me know what happens next.


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Wael!

“trace – training and coaching executives

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