In the past few years, I’ve spoke with two potential clients about doing workshops or keynotes designed to help employees deal with changes at work.  The changes range from drastic reorganizations all the way down to simple things like office arrangements.  Regardless of the change, the issues are the same.  Employees are frustrated, demotivated, angry, unmotivated, and depressed.  I’m being asked in some way to fix everything and make everyone happy.  If contracted, here’s the message I’m going to give to the audience:

Get a Life!

Now before you quit reading because you think that’s cruel, let me explain.  All of us have two lives we lead.  One is our WORK life, which is your job or primary vocation. These range from corporate CEO all the way to a stay-at-home parent.  The second life is your ESSENTIAL life, which contains your hopes, dreams, aspirations as well as the things you enjoy outside of work like your family and hobbies.  For our WORK life we do a job in exchange for a paycheck.  In our ESSENTIAL life we are compensated by a sense of well-being and satisfaction.  We offer our skills and knowledge to our WORK life while our energy, emotion, love and affection go to our ESSENTIAL life.  So long as we keep the balance between them, things tend to function reasonably well.  Get the wires crossed and you’re going to find misery.

Unless you’re really fortunate or designed your career intentionally, there’s no way your WORK life can possibly compete with or compensate like your ESSENTIAL life.  When you put your heart and soul into your WORK life, you will eventually find disappointment.  I know. Been there, done that.  Even if you have a reasonable sense of happiness in your WORK life, any changes (which are always beyond your control by the way) will quickly threaten that.  It’s why organizational change makes people so unhappy – although some changes are simply stupid which I will address in another post.

So here’s how these keynotes or training sessions typically go.  I introduce myself.  The audience then does some sort of an introduction activity.  I’ll ask about the reason they’re attending and then the whining starts.  Everybody is unhappy and playing the victim card.  I let them vent for awhile (mainly because I can’t do a darned thing about their predicament – I don’t work there) and then tell them:

Get a Life!

I spend the rest of the time getting them to focus less on the WORK life and more on the ESSENTIAL life.  Some folks are so ingrained in the workplace misery that they refuse to do so.  I can’t help them.  Others struggle because for so long they have identified their self-worth with their job.  We work together to separate those two and get them focused on what’s important.  Finally, we craft a plan to work toward that ESSENTIAL life (whether it’s new priorities or even a new career that leverages that ESSENTIAL life) and reframe the WORK life as what it is:  a means to an end.

This week, think about those two lives you lead.  Are you so focused on one that you’ve forgotten or neglected the other?  Remember, your WORK life gives you an paycheck in exchange for your knowledge, skills, and performance.  You owe your boss 100% of your effort for that eight hour day.  Your ESSENTIAL life gets the rest and in exchange you are compensated by satisfaction and happiness.  Work first to separate the two and then begin a plan to bring more of that ESSENTIAL life experience into your WORK life.  It’s possible.  I’m one of those rare individuals who’s done it.  I’m happy