Work Doesn't Need to be a "Four-Letter Word"
Posted: August, 2009
When is "work" not an obscenity? When we like to do what we're doing. When we'd rather be doing something else, work becomes a four-letter word that's often accompanied by "hard, boring, stupid, painful, tiring, or ugly." The golfing greats, Lorena Ochoa and Tiger Woods talk about "having a good time" when they've played a ka-jillion rounds of golf in a high-stakes tournament. I would rather stick a nail in my eye than do that! Unless the purse was big enough...and I actually knew how to play golf. Then, I could probably convince myself that it was not work-it was "having a good time."
We only get one shot at life. We need to enjoy what we're doing, or...
1. Find something else to do.
Okay, sometimes that just won't happen easily. Move on to number 2.
2. Find the joy in whatever it is we're doing.
Maybe your co-workers are good to be with, or you get to decorate your office or cubicle to suit yourself, or you get to earn tons of frequent flyer miles with all the traveling you do, or you get to work from home in your bathrobe, or every once in awhile, you get to do something that really helps someone else or your company or yourself? Or maybe your company has great health insurance. (I once made a screen-saver for myself that said "We have great health insurance." At that time, in that job, that's about all I could find to be joyful about. It wasn't great, but it sustained me until I found something else in the job to make me joyful.)
If you're going to have to do work anyway, you might as well find the joy in what you're doing.
Don't Fight For Me, Fight With Me
Posted: August, 2009
This is a challenge that many men don't understand too well. If you're a man reading this, you may want to pay close attention. If you're a woman-print this off and hand it to someone needs to know it.
To set the appropriate expectation-the fights in this article are the type that occur in a business arena. "Opponents" may square off over ideas, roles, quality of work, client relationships (internal and external), promotions, management approaches...there is a large menu of the type of battles that occur in business. It's a caring tendency to want to look out for the underdog. It's kind, maybe even noble sometimes, to wage the battles for people who are "weaker" or who appear to be unable to fight for themselves for...some other reasons. However, there's a problem when someone steps forward to fight ahead of a person who should be (and probably is) capable of handling her own problems.
The majority of men, in our equality-enlightened era, declare that they fully accept that women are (at the least) their equivalent in intelligence and ability. These men are careful to speak of and to lead and follow, the women with whom they work as equal partners-until they perceive that a woman is being "attacked." That's when the equality becomes less equal. In the blink of an eye, the women is relegated to the weaker, incapable-of-fighting-her-own-battles position, and her male "rescuer" feels the need to do the fighting for her. The man will pick up the lance, mount his white horse, and rush to the aid of the "fair damsel in distress"-when she hasn't even yet sounded the alarm. He believes he's doing the right thing, and he would be if the woman was really incapable of waging her own fight. But, most women in business can fight for their own ideas, roles, and quality of work.
How do we stop this? By just saying, "No...thanks for the offer...but I can handle this one." We've never been the weaker sex!
