Why are you working so hard?

The link between working hard and life disappointment

Recently I started to work with a client on a customized management program on WLC – work-life coaching.

After going through this process with several clients already, I realized that most of us might have a very wrong belief. For example: when we were learning in school, how were we told to learn – learn hard? If you do not learn hard, you might not have great opportunities in life.

When we are working now, how do we believe we should work to have success and a great career? We should work hard.

After +25 years of working hard, I now know that it is not right or wrong. Sometimes we work hard, but if we do not have enough wisdom, we will destroy ourselves. This is wrong for the business as naturally it will have more and more challenges to motivate and retain people, and wrong for us as well as work and career are more like a marathon than a sprint. Even if you feel that others are expecting you to run sprints all the time, did you see anyone running a marathon as a sprint?

What does being heard feel like?

Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.
— David Augsburger

When you work hard most of the time, it’s possible to have a state of mind that is anything but pleasant, to you and others. So you might become disappointed quite often.

DISAPPOINTED?

Ever ordered a medium-rare steak in a restaurant, and it was served to you well done?
Ever asked your teen in the morning to do the dishes and come home from work to find out that they’re not done?
Ever driven somewhere, and it took you twice as long because of a construction area?
Ever done tons of exercise and gotten on the scale two weeks later just to find that your weight is the same?
Ever gone to your doctor for a routine wax clean-out and left with a surgery date on your schedule?

Expecting life to always turn out the way you want is guaranteed to lead to disappointment because life has its way of turning out. And when those unfulfilled expectations include also the failure of other people to behave the way you expect them to, the disappointment will turn to resentment.

Why don’t we get upset when a cup of coffee does not make itself, but we might get upset if someone else does not make us a cup of coffee? Where do we get the sense of power to think that merely expecting others to behave the way we want them to will make them behave that way? And what entitles us to get angry at other people when they fail to meet our expectations?

Expectations with people are often based on an implicit social contract. That is, without actually verbalizing expectations about give-and-take in a relationship, people construct stories in their heads about legitimate expectations of each other. So, people in a relationship have a “deal” in which the deal’s specifics are never really talked about. It is hard for someone to live up to your expectations when they don’t know what they are, but you still might see this failure as a violation of your social contract. And if you have an irritated state of being… then it’s clear that you are mostly disappointed. Becoming aware of this link might ring a bell for you as it rang a bell for me too.

More on this topic: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201802/the-psychology-expectations 

I can help you transform working hard into working smart! Schedule a meeting here and let’s start this journey together!

Author

Ioana Marcu

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