This past week, I took a week of vacation to attend a party
in Lancaster, PA for my parents, who are coming up on their 50th
anniversary, which is quite an achievement. This involves a long plane flight from the Seattle area to
the Philadelphia area, which gives me a lot of time to think about where I’m
at, how I feel, and where I want to go.
I don’t know why, but I’ve always found the airplane a great place to
think. It’s probably because I can
simply put on my headphones, listen to music, and spend time thinking without
the worry about being interrupted by the phone, email, or text messages. In usual fashion, this trip has
inspired some thoughts that I felt the need to write a blog about.
Over the last couples of weeks, I’ve had some positive
developments at work. I’m now more
formally in a role that better suits my skills, I work for a boss that really
understands how I “tick” (maybe she should worry about that…), and I work with
people who want to make a difference, learn and grow. Additionally, our team started filling out a survey (enneagram) that
helps to identify your personality traits, and assigns a number to you. I filled it out, and came out between a
2 and 3. A 2 is identified with a
pleaser, and a 3 is identified with an achiever. I have to say that I can’t dispute either one. While I look at those numbers, it makes
me reflect on who I am. I have
always been someone who enjoys working with other people, and doing whatever I
can to make them happy and comfortable.
Additionally, I look at both my personal and professional life, and find
that I am the most motivated when I have a goal and am trying to achieve
something. I get bored and
frustrated when I’m unable to achieve things, and feel that I am unable to
please the people I care about. I
guess I could dig deeper into it, but on the surface, it really does describe
me the best of any of these surveys I have taken in the past.
This has also caused me to think deeper about myself. My career has largely been roles that
could be described as “the hired gun” or “the human fire extinguisher”. If there’s a challenge or a difficult
situation, I’m going to step up and figure out how to accomplish the task at
hand. It’s arguably served me well
as I have done well in my career.
In many respects, it has really fulfilled the two things that motivate
me. As an achiever, its very
obvious how those roles played to my strengths. Additionally, as a pleaser, I’ve been able to please people
by achieving things. In an odd
sort of way, my career choices have mirrored my personality in a way I have
never thought about before. Go
figure…after twenty six years in the computer industry, I finally figure myself
out.
As I reflect, the career choices have been fun, but have
often left me feeling lost or confused.
The initial excitement of achieving something or pleasing someone seems
to fade quicker and quicker each time.
The after glow, if you will, just doesn’t seem to bring as much
satisfaction as it used to. I also
look at the amount of stress I put myself through, and the number of health
issues it has caused at times, and I often wonder how much longer I can do what
I do. Don’t get me wrong. I
wouldn’t change a thing. I’ve
enjoyed what I do and who I am.
However, I find myself at a crossroads where I feel that there has to be
more to it.
I also look at my “hobby” of coaching youth soccer, which I
recently retired from. It’s a
completely different environment and skill set. As a coach, I can’t simply step on the field and fix things
by playing myself. I have to rely
on my ability to motivate a group of young soccer players to better themselves
individually, and more importantly, as a unit on the field. Again, I have arguably been successful
as a soccer coach. For the most
part, I have been able to get through to young soccer players and motivate them
to do more than they thought they could, and even motivated them to play as a
unit on the field. We haven’t
always had success in the form of wins and losses, but we’ve always improved
from where we started, which is all you can ask for as a coach.
Occasionally, my work life and my hobby have crossed
paths. I will often give advice to
co-workers on how to best work with other co-workers, and I often draw on my
soccer coaching experiences to convey the information. Additionally, I facilitate a lot of
team building and bonding events.
This has all been great and been very much appreciated by management. However, I have a confession to make. I can do much, much better. There is one area that I really need to
work on, and I think other achievers will be able to relate to what I’m about
to say.
When you function in your career as a “hired gun”, the
ability to achieve something is usually in your own hands, or in the hands of
yourself and a small team of people that you implicitly trust. Those situations are somewhat easy to
control so that you can achieve the desired outcome. However, I have often fallen short when it involves larger
groups of people with varying skill sets and motivation levels. I’ve often felt that it’s impossible to
motivate some people, or even that some people just don’t care enough to
succeed. Is that really true, or
can I do more? How do I grow this
ability within larger groups of people with a more diverse set of motivations
and skill sets?
There are tons of negative feelings and self-doubt when I
explore this deeper within my own mind.
You run the gamut of emotions.
Am I making myself less valuable by making other people more
valuable? Will I become
obsolete? Can I be easily replaced
by another achiever or pleaser?
Will I be less respected or liked by my co-workers? In other words, if I succeed at growing
other achievers and pleasers, do I make myself expendable? It’s a difficult set of questions for
me to face and ask myself. My
self-confidence hasn’t always been as strong as it should be for a lot of deep
emotional reasons I won’t go into that started at an early age growing up. This may sound ridiculous to many
readers, but it’s always at the forefront of my mind. Call it fear of failure…
Recently, with the help of my boss, I actually took a small
group of people with varying levels of motivation and talent, and lead them
through a task of accomplishing a somewhat aggressive goal at work. We really hit a home run with what we
did, and even though I felt a lot of pressure that we had to succeed, I didn’t
just naturally jump in and take over when things appeared to be going off
course. I combined my soccer
coaching skills and work skills to motivate individuals to be better and work
together as a team to accomplish our objective. The experience was motivating, and probably the first real
experience I had in bringing my hobby into the workplace in a way that was
beyond the typical team building activities I have done in the past.
It was a good feeling, but I still have doubts. In my previous experiences as a “hired
gun”, everything was pretty measurable, and your contribution to them was
equally as measurable. How do I
measure my success at motivating others to accomplish the goal? It’s a lot harder than measuring your own
individual impact. Yes, we
accomplished the goal. However,
was I effective as a leader and motivator, or was it just luck? Could I do it again if asked? If so, how would I measure
success? For the achiever and
pleaser in me, these are hard questions as I struggle with how to measure it
and measure my contribution to it.
It’s very uncomfortable space for me right now. Would I do it again if asked? Absolutely. Will I continue to struggle with how to measure myself and
my value? Absolutely. Self-doubt is just a default behavior
that I need to work on.
I am committed to this transition because in my current
role, our organization can’t succeed if I don’t try to grow other people. There’s just too much work to do and
not enough time, even for a motivated achiever like me. My career has always been defined as
someone that achieves the impossible.
I will always need a component of that in my career. However, I need to continue to build
other people. This will require
more work and patience than I’ve had in the past, but it’s yet another way for
me to grow. Can I do it? I don’t know, and that’s the answer
that bothers me. However, I have
to try, and at the end of the day, I guess that’s all I can do…try…
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