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October-November 2008 Newsletter: Bring Yourself to Work
This
Confidence newsletter is sent each month to subscribers of
www.yourmostconfidentself.com from Kate Burton and Brinley Platts,
the authors of "Building
Confidence for Dummies" and creators of the Your Most Confident Self
website. Bring Yourself to Work
If it’s October then “Bring Yourself to Work Day” must be looming (it’s on 31 October). This is the campaign that Kate, I and some other coaching colleagues launched back in 2004, with the intention of people boosting their personal sense of contribution and fulfilment through their work.
We’ve had all kinds of reactions to it over the years, and not all positive:
But we’ve also had a lot of positive feedback and gratitude over the years too. And I know that some people have changed their careers as a result of taking on what we’re offering through this simple campaign. This month I’d like to tell my own career story, which helps explain why I think our work is so important.
It’s amusing to look back now, but I only got my first real job when I was 27 yrs old. Paradoxically, this wasn’t easy, involving sacrifice and a mounting sense of frustration, but it was entirely my choice. Gap years and travelling were not so popular in the UK of the ‘70s but after taking my degree I managed to do several years of voluntary or low-paid work in many different countries before knuckling down to a proper “professional” job.
By then I had studied and worked in various parts of the UK, Germany, Switzerland, France, Iran and the USA. I had travelled across the USA in both directions and visited the middle-east at the start of the Iranian revolution. I had worked as a children’s play leader in a women’s hostel, unqualified social worker, cook, print-finishing machinist, nanny to a Mexican diplomat’s children, lecturer and teacher of meditation. These last two were my life’s passion at the time.
You can perhaps imagine some of the conversations I had with my father as I made the odd visit home. Words like “proper” and “job” and “when”, were combined in sentences that expressed a world of concern but fell like water off a duck’s back. I wasn’t just unemployed, I was unemployable and proud of it. There wasn’t an organisation or a career out there that was meaningful enough to tie me down.
Finally I grew tired of it and decided to settle down, but how? My CV was unconventional at best, so I had no option but to play it up and turn my apparent experience weaknesses into strengths. I was given that first job at 27 precisely because I had travelled and done so much on my own. My new company saw me as a “self-starter” and that is surely what I am. Eight further years of travelling around the globe, for decent pay at last, and family life began to catch up with me. I had children by then, and they wanted their father at home.
But I had the same problem as before. My global experience made me a leader in my field but that was all overseas. I had never worked professionally in the UK and I knew nobody. Generously, my company offered me the chance to start something new again and work in the City of London, so I commuted 3-days a week from Cheshire for three years and made it home for weekends. When my department was acquired by another firm I went with it and we relocated to London. A few years later I led a management buyout of the same business and a few more years later I sold my stake in it and quit. That was in 2004, when Kate and I began our book and launched Bring Yourself to Work Day. To my surprise I discovered that I only ever had one “proper” job!
Why am I telling you this? Because I believe passionately that work is not simply a job. I’ve only ever had one real job but I always had plenty of work. Work is the creation of value, not just turning up and collecting a pay cheque. Work can be a vocation, a duty, a life’s passion whether paid or unpaid. Sure, it can also be drudgery, but we can usually do something about that with help or with time provided we want it to be more than that..
The tragedy of working a job for many people is that they have such low expectations of it. And because their expectations are low their aspiration is low and their performance tends to be low too. In these circumstances people tend to do the minimum and this perpetuates a culture of close and negative supervision. I wouldn’t want to do that kind of job either.
But when we take back personal ownership of our individual work and contribution, when we are prepared to express more of our true selves through our work roles, this exerts a powerful force for change – and the first thing that changes is our relation to our jobs. We either find new meaning and fulfilment in the role and the people around us or we find a new and better outlet for our work contribution.
We set up Bring Yourself to Work Day to give everyone permission to have a taste of that kind of personal power and freedom. Freedom through contribution. Try it on 31 October, get all your friends to try it, you’ll like it!
To find out more go to www.bringyourselftowork.com.
Best
wishes
Kate’s new "Neuro-Linguistic Programming Workbook for Dummies" by Romilla Ready and Kate Burton ISBN 9780 470 51973 8 is now out on Amazon and in good bookstores. It’s the sequel to "Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Dummies" by Romilla Ready and Kate Burton ISBN 0764570285
The best selling "Building Self-Confidence for Dummies" by Kate Burton and Brinley Platts ISBN 0470016698 is also on Amazon or contact us for signed copies.
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