Unleashing your true passion and skills – introducing a small exercise that could really help you make a positive change to your relationship to work.
Hopefully, you enjoy your job. At least some of the time. And if I asked you which activity at work you liked the most, I’m assuming you could tell me with only a little thought.
But what if I asked you to be more specific and pinpoint the exact MOMENT during that activity when the light goes on in your eyes? Have you ever thought about that?
What are the exact moments during your favourite work activity where you feel a little extra joy, fully attentive, and have a sense of being really present? Stop reading for a moment and think about it.
Understanding the moments that get us firing
This is a question that I have asked myself, asked members of teams I’ve managed, and which I ask during one of the workshops that I give. I find the question to be an excellent way of getting to the root of what truly motivates us. By zooming in on these small but vivid moments, we can shed some of the associations that are connected to a particular activity. The moments that people come up with are often generalisable. By finding them, you can start to design them into more of your activities, both at work and outside of work.
An example or two
Say that you are a digital designer. When asked what you like doing, you might reply that you enjoy designing. When you dig deeper, you find that what you really, and more specifically, enjoy, is problem-solving with others, keeping your artboards organised, or testing your designs on real users and seeing how they react.
Here’s another example. Maybe you are a manager and say that you like leading people. Fair enough. Again we dig deeper and find that the moments that you really savour are things like creating order out of chaos, asking questions that help people come unstuck, or when you create and give a presentation.
For each of these answers, you can dig even further. Let's hone in on giving presentations. You like giving presentations, but which part of that activity? Is it crafting a message, adapting to the reactions that you get from your audience, answering questions afterwards, or what?
Following the clues
All of these answers are clues to what motivates you. When you have a more precise idea of what you enjoy, without a lot of unreflected baggage about work roles and work tasks, the next step is to find ways in which you can have more of those peak moments.
What is one of my own moments? Having spent more than 20 years working as a designer, people probably think my answer would revolve around creativity, perhaps coming up with new ideas or solving problems. Sure, I like those things, I like them a lot, but one of my peak moments, funnily enough, occurs when I run my workshop about motivation.
It happens at the very moment when I see the light go on in people’s eyes as they identify some of their peak moments. I know, this is terribly meta. But I am not trying to make a cute point at the end of this little essay. There is a real and profound joy for me at being present when someone discovers something useful about themselves, something that they can quite easily and immediately start to apply to create positive change. I also savour the fact that such a small thing can have such a broad impact.