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Why to Love Your Work

  • Posted on July 1, 2009 at 10:12 pm

The prospect of retiring soon–or ever–has dimmed for a lot of us. If you’re going to be in the workforce for a very long time, there is one thing that’s absolutely essential: LOVE WHAT YOU DO.

Once we’ve been at something for a while, it’s comfortable to just keep doing it, even if it never was fun. But it makes heaps more sense to do what you love.

If the thought of doing what you are doing now until the day you die feels like drinking a large glass of vinegar, please make plans to do something else. Here are five good reasons to use that strategy.

JOB SATISFACTION: The first reason is, of course, that it makes your life more satisfying. When you love your job, you go to work happy and you come home happy. That translates into better health. Let’s not kid ourselves. No job is perfect all day every day. But if most days have you humming while you grade the papers, adjust the machine, or flip the burgers, you’re onto something.

If, on the other hand, just pulling into the company parking lot makes you want to throw up, you have a little remodeling project to take on. You need to make your work match yourself or you’re going to miserable 24 hours a day.

This sounds simple, but quite often it isn’t. Often, you get to “That’s it. I’m outta here” before you realize the problem. Being “outta here” without a plan for what you want to do next isn’t such a good idea in this economy.

There are good books to help you figure out what you really want. (Books by Martha Beck, Barbara Sher, and me all offer help with this.).) You can try a life coach. Or do a Vision Quest. You can contemplate you left thumb for fifteen minutes every morning until the light starts to dawn if that’s what works for you. Do SOMETHING to discover the kind of work that thrills you when you think of it.

The best clues are how you feel when you encounter the work that’s really yours. The idea of getting involved in it will be energizing. You will have a calm sense of confidence as you start to explore it. Be sincere in looking for YOUR answers. And be open to what comes. You will be amazed.

TALENT MATCH: When you do what you love, the probability that you are truly suited for it goes up exponentially. I have a long time friend who was a good geologist. He could also sell salt water in the Mariana Trench. When he linked his natural sales skills with what he knew about rocks, his prospects skyrocketed. He sold mining and construction equipment quite successfully.

PERCEIVED VALUE: People like to work with those who are happy at what they are doing. When you do what you love, you do it well. Customers or clients will love you. The people who love what they are doing are the ones who get asked to be on the company dream teams, too.

This is not a case of faking it for the sake of advancement. There’s an intuitive piece to this that you just can’t counterfeit. If you like what you do, people like working with you. Period. So find what you like. Find what you LOVE.

JOB SECURITY: Loving what you do will not guarantee you never get laid off. Not even working for yourself guarantees that anymore. But when you love what you do, you find other ways to use what you know to be able to keep doing it.

If you are told they don’t need you as the team lead manufacturing elephant harnesses and you love leather, there are other ways to work with it. If you love to work in a kitchen and just got let go as a short order cook, you may hire on with a caterer, or make nightly meals for clients who can then look forward to your delicious deliveries after a long day of their own work (also at something they love, I hope).

LONGEVITY: You can try to MAKE yourself like what you are already doing, but that doesn’t work for long. The real answer is to find something you love doing whether you get paid for it or not. That solution gives you one last plus–something you will be happy continuing to do–in some form–for as long as you live.

Including for money if you need to. There are lawyers still active in law at age 99; a favorite centenarian story was of a woman still proofreading for the St. Louis Dispatch after her 100th birthday.

Do what you love and use it to thrive–for a long time

Copyright (c) 2009 Mary Lloyd

Mary Lloyd is the author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. She offers seminars on how you can create a meaningful retirement for yourself and consults to help your business attract and use retired talent well. She is also available as a speaker. For more insights on how to live well in retirement and before it, go to => http://www.mining-silver.com .

Article Source: Why to Love Your Work

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The Goal of Team Motivation

  • Posted on July 1, 2009 at 9:04 pm

Your workforce is like a sports team. The success of everyone can be brought down by one bad performance. Like a team of professional athletes, your staff must be prepared to give 110% each day. Otherwise, the weakest link will ruin everything for the entire team. But how do you convince each worker to do their best when most employees dislike their jobs and are worried about getting a pink slip any day. The answer is effective team motivation.

What Doesn’t Work

First, we have to discuss some things that are simply not going to be effective in terms of team motivation. Don’t ask your employees to play silly trust-building activities or to sit around in a circle sharing their innermost feelings. These methods do not work. Instead, you have to dig deeper and truly learn about human motivation. After all, what works for one of your “players” is going to have a positive impact on them all.

One Negative Hurts the Positives

Maybe you’ve had this experience yourself. You’ve been at a job, a school, or maybe even at a store when someone starts up a conversation with you. They are very negative about everything they see. How do you start to feel? Whether you had a good impression or not, chances are you’re going to start feeling more negative about your environment. That’s the power of negative thought.

To combat this, you can’t afford not to be working on motivating your entire staff. If only a few people jump on the bandwagon, you’re still not going to see positive results.

Egoism Rules the Workplace

The biggest mistake most employers make when it comes to motivating employers is forgetting that workers – like the managers above them – are egoists. That means they are primarily motivated by what benefits them. If you give a worker an assignment, he or she doesn’t complete the assignment because you’re their friend or because they want you to look good to your supervisors. Instead, they are acting out of their own selfish desire to keep their job and get paid, as well as their desire not to be yelled at, reprimanded, or fired for not doing the work.

Once you recognize that everyone’s biggest motivation involves the idea of what’s in it for them you’ll have a much easier time getting everyone on board and of making a difference in how your office operates.

The Rules of the Team

Because you are a team and because team motivation is so important, you must take this approach seriously if you want it to work. Don’t be surprised if the rest of the team laughs or jokes about the idea behind your back. They are going to be resistant, but if you are persistent you will soon see a change in their attitudes. As they come to adopt the new approach to the team, more of the office workers will also begin to change their attitudes and soon you’ll be running a well-motivated operation.

Victor Ghebre is the editor of http://www.settinggoals101.com where you get practical tips and information on goal setting, motivation, leadership and more.

Visit http://www.settinggoals101.com/importance-of-motivation.html to learn how to set yourself up for success and get free tips on how to effectively
stay motivated.

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Article Source: The Goal of Team Motivation

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