When everything’s changing, there’s one thing that will never change.
It’s the fact that change creates opportunity.
If situations, people, and attitudes are changing in your world of work, you’re in luck. It’s a perfect opportunity to hit the reset button on whatever’s not working for you, including processes, expectations, and even relationships.
Here’s an audio-only excerpt from an in-person presentation called “Reset, Revise or Even Rescue Your Career.” Find out more about my live and online talks that help you retain and build your teams here.
More resources to help your change create opportunity:
Is It Time for a Relationship Reset at Work? How to Know & What to Do
Reset Your Remote Team: 4 Fresh Strategies
Make Work Easier: 8 Experiments to Save Time, Money and Stress
My latest book, “Red Cape Rescue: Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job,” which teaches you how you can take back control, right where you are, just as you are.
Transcript
For those that prefer to read, here’s a rough transcription of the audio above.
The third strategy to reset your career, reset your week, reset your year– is remembering, that everything’s changed.
Everything has changed.
Sure, a lot of the things we do and think look like they’re the same. But underneath the surface, I heard a lot of you talking about this already. People have changed in what’s important to them. people’s values have shifted, and not everybody in the same direction, everybody’s gone through their time of change, whether they came out with it, like better than ever, or whether they struggled and are still struggling.
So what change means, change always presents an opportunity.
And so I ask you this question: what if the way that you’ve done things doesn’t need to be the way that you continue to do things?
This is a question that smart professionals should be asking and are asking in almost everything that you do. Because what happens when we’re making the same assumptions over and over, but the situations have changed, is that we get stuck and stagnant.
There’s a story around the guy with a fish in a fishbowl. And you know, this will get dirty after a while. So we filled up the bathtub, and put the fishbowl in the bathtub, and then gently puts a little fishy into the bathtub, so that he could wash the fishbowl out. What he noticed is that the fish, now given the whole area of the bathtub, only kept swimming in the circle that his tiny bowl defined. Something had changed. But that fish didn’t realize it.
Where are the things that you’re doing that, whether they’re in your career, whether they’re things that you that are impacting your business, where the way you’ve done things doesn’t need to be the way you do things?
And I think often for folks who are in a service orientation, high-end customer service orientation like you are, we think people can see it. How can they not see that this has changed, because now we have half the team that we used to have? How can they see it doesn’t change, because you know, we’ve got all these new members or we have less time on the calendar to do whatever we’re doing.
But people don’t. People are seeing their own changes. They’re seeing their own lives.
So we have to make sure that what we need, what we see is clear to others. And so this is the reset button. And recognizing that you can reset a time of change invites us to reset almost everything.
And that includes things like relationships, having an honest conversation to say, you know, I’ve just been noticing, we’re not connecting in the same way that we were or, or we’re not connecting in a way that I really would like to have a better relationship with you that you control, saying that you control, inviting somebody for a bigger conversation. There are processes and systems I’m seeing a bunch of stuff in my work with traditional corporate companies where they’re trying to fit old processes into new models, or processes that they made up when COVID hit that they’re now that have now hardened.
And no one’s saying, wait a minute, do we really need that daily stand up? We needed it back then it was the exact same thing to do in a win in a sprint crisis. But what you do in a crisis, in a sprint, is not marathon behavior.
So there may be some things on this list. What are the things you might need to reset? Expectations? Hey, I’d like to take a step back and just, you know, revisit what the appropriate expectations of this should be. helped me understand what are you thinking about x?
You can use the excuse that everything has changed . . .because it has.
