Felt like you were working in your job and the return on your time and effort was hardly worth it?

Have you almost got to the point of why do I make the effort other than to scrape in enough cash to sustain my existence?

Last week I was sending myself into this spiraling pit of mental slaughter. However I took hold of it, asked what I could do about it and now I’m a happy chap at work.

Start Enjoying your Job Now

First remember that how you feel at work is determined by what you are focusing on.

I noticed that when I was dead bored, felt like I was just wasting my time, looking at the clock to see when I could leave I was focusing on one particular thought. This is not helping me learn about life coaching and improving peoples lives (What I’m really excited about right now).

With this being my overriding thought it was no wonder that being at work felt like a waste of time, it was to that thought.

So to change how I feel at work I change how I think.

Forget the negative, focus on the positive things that you can take from being at your job.

What if there was something you could enjoy about every situation at work?

Choose some rules based entirely on your internal focus that would allow you to enjoy every situation of work.

I choose two rules. One was that whenever I was communicating with another individual I would take the opportunity to learn as much as I could about human behaviour and practice my coaching skills. This is incredibly aligned with my goal of exploring life coaching so it actually excites me to go to work.

Also this rule is very broad so it allows me to enjoy most of my work situations easily.

The second rule is about handling the times when I’m not interacting with humans, that being when I’m creating software. Here I choose to focus on being incredibly efficient and produce software excellence because I know I enjoy the challenge of holding myself to a high standard.

Now in two rules I knew how I could enjoy each moment at work.

The next day at work was amazing. My experience had totally changed and I would have to say I truly enjoyed it.

This is the power of considering what you focus on.

What you focus on changes your life.

The Structured Approach

1. Make a list of all the situations/activities you experience at work, group similar ones together if you like under category headings.

2. Pick one activity and decide what you can enjoy about it, what you can choose to focus on to enjoy it. Write down what your focus will be when in that activity.

3. See if that focus can be applied to as many of your other activities as possible. You want to have a simple set of focuses so you can easily remember them. I found I could set just two focuses and that would satisfy all my work situations.

4. Repeat until you know a way to enjoy every activity.

Remember your happiness comes entirely from within.

If you have more than 3 focuses you should try to make more general rules to make it easier on yourself. Otherwise try implementing each new focus one day at a time. Whenever you feel bad at work, remember what you could focus on to enjoy it right now.

To make this even more real pick a situation, close your eyes and imagine how you would act in that situation given your enjoyable focus. You should feel a sense of enjoyment and maybe even a smile will crack on your face.

Life can be wonderful, you just have to choose it to be so.

I agree that the best jobs are the ones that align with your values and passions.

But you should never leave a job just because you are not happy with it.

Sound contradictory?

A Job is a Job

A job is simply a set of physical or mental tasks that are undertaken in order to receive remuneration.

In other words, a job is what you do to get money or some other emotional benefit.

A job is neither good or bad, it is the same as walking down the street.

You choose if you are happy at your job or not.

Read that sentence again.

Understand that you Choose to Hate your Job

If you hate your current job then ask yourself the following questions:

• How would you describe the negative emotions/thoughts you have towards your job?
• What are the activities that bring up these negative emotions?
• Who makes me feel bad about working and what is it that they do or say that makes me feel this way?

When thinking about it you discover that what you truly hate is the emotions that you experience while you are at work.

So the solution to deal with a job you hate is to first understand why this job raises the emotions that it does.

A while back I wrote on How to Not Hate your Job in which I talked about how I went from being totally stressed out at work to actually having fun while doing the same job.

I hated my job because I couldn’t deal with the stress of highly strung bosses and upset customers. Once I realised that the stress was what I hated about my job I took steps to learn how to deal with it and consequently the same situations no longer hurt me.

I no longer hated my job, rather I used it as a tool to learn about myself and to create a better life.

This is why you must understand why you ‘hate your job’ before you try to change it.

Make Change Based on Understanding Yourself

No job will bring you never ending happiness.

Happiness comes from inside yourself, a job is just where you get to express it.

Once you have gotten through and released your hate towards a job you can start working on discovering more enjoyment in your work.

Look at the things that are most enjoyable both in your life and in your workplace. Try to spend more time doing those at your job.

If you find that you cannot bring those aspects you enjoy into your job then now is the time when you can start looking for a job that aligns more with your passions.

Now you choose a new job based on what you want, not on running away from what you think you hate.

We make better choices when we understand ourselves.

From approaching potential partners and managing your friendships to conversing with clients.

Just before every action there is a flash in the major centers of the body, generally the heart and the mind.

These flashes can result in either a compulsion to act or create an inhibition to proceed.

While I say slay them both and act from clarity here I want to talk about tackling those flashes that inhibit us.

Because people that are often paralyzed by these often have trouble following through with important decisions in their lives and consequently become trapped in their same old prison.

Strategies for Freedom from Hesitation

Continual Awareness

In order to break free of what holds you back in that second when you think you have already committed yourself, you must be able to sense it in that precise instant.

These flashes cannot be seen by the eyes, you have to develop an internal sense.

Just as when someone attempts to grab your wrist and the hairs detect something allowing you to turn free, your internal sense enables you to break free of internal paralysis before it can seize you.

To develop this sense requires that you discover the difference between how your body and mind feels when it is being propelled by a train of thought or emotion compared to when it is clear and tranquil.

The quickest way to discover this is to sit quietly and close your eyes for about 10 minutes. Notice your thoughts bouncing around in your head and most importantly notice the silence in between them. Now ask yourself:

“What is present during the silence between thoughts?”

You are not looking to answer this in words, rather you want to ask this question to help you explore and feel this silence more.

Once you have sampled it you need to look for it in daily life in each moment. Just pause to feel what exists between thoughts.

The same applies to your heart. Watch how emotions feel in your chest and what it feels like when none are acting.

When you can tell the difference between when you are clear and when a thought/emotion has entered then you have a foundation that will enable you to take control of yourself and your life.

Weapon of Choice

Choose your own form of self confidence. Choose an activity in which you can practice dominating yourself. You want to develop a trust in your own abilities.

I practice martial arts, the esoteric nature of solo katas provides a good practice ground for burning through your enemies.

Meditation and prayer are other techniques that help develop the confidence required to know you can handle any thought or emotion that arises.

Once you know how your tool works you have to practice using it on a day to day basis as any little thought appears. Such that when it comes time to encounter a larger hesitation you can switch it on at will.

Decision Preparation

When it comes to actions that we have time to consider and make decisions about there are some fundamental understandings that can help you lessen the grip that any cause of hesitation can put on you.

1. You will never have perfect and/or complete information for making decisions

Don’t put off action just because you might be wrong in your assumptions about other people. You cannot know for sure how someone will respond to you. Take off the gloves and present yourself to the world.

2. There is no tragedy you cannot recover from

It may seem like there is the possibility of undesirable results from your planned action. But the mind will always make things seem catastrophic when there is nothing to stop you from moving on from whatever happens.

3. Doubt creates the D in Self-Destruction

Do not second guess your decisions. If you have come to a decision through a logical analysis and after weighing your options decided upon an action then you have no reason to doubt your decision to act.

The food that doubt thrives on is the fact that we are stuck with incomplete information. In the case of interacting with other people it is worse because not only do we have limited information but what information we have is actually just our interpretation of the words and actions of another person. Such things are easy for a thought to manipulate to make a case against our action.

If you allow doubt to exist in your thought process it will lead to the destruction of your action.

A method I have been using to nullify persistent doubts is to first realise that a doubt is just another possibility like your other conclusions. Then you consider both the doubt and your other conclusions and assign them each a percentage possibility of being true. Now doubt has no power as is it just another possibility. Next you choose the one with the greatest possibility of being true and act upon its basis.

Understanding these elements will leave you more confident to discard any thought that may doubt action in the critical moments.

Now go for it and burn with fire through the world.

Yet I know that the only happiness worth having is the one you can call upon whenever you want, which can only be gained through an individuals own effort.

Consequently I can only act to inspire and enable. Here’s what I try to give to grow happiness.

What to Give for Happiness

1. Be a Living Example of Happiness with no Restrictions

For others to change, most require some sort of proof to realise that such a state of being is possible. There can be no better example than your own life. Don’t be afraid to share parts of your life that were not the greatest, but don’t forget to share how grateful you are for being able to figure out a way through them.

Unfortunately for some, these examples are too far from what they feel is their current state. They are wrong but the example becomes too distant from their own view of themselves.

They have all sorts of reasons flying through their minds that they may not have even recognised. Their situation is much worse, the challenges are different. Their families are holding them back, they don’t have a good support network. All irrelevant but these things will stop anyone from discovering lasting happiness. Therefore we employ gift 2.

2. Provide a Action that can be Taken to Lessen Pain or Realise Happiness

In order to break through the glass prison something new needs to be presented, or something old needs to be reborn from a different angle.

One approach is to disillusion them about something that is holding them back. Such an approach requires a great deal of compassion and understanding. Picking something that does not have a lot of emotional charge behind it and enabling them to remove it themselves can be an eye opening experience.

The other way is to bypass the obstacles and reach straight for a greater realisation. Here you appeal to a goal of the individual. By laying out a path to their desired destination they feel that maybe, just maybe this is something they could actual do. Something they could achieve. This method doesn’t get them to directly confront their issues but it does do two things.

Firstly it ignites a creative energy, this energy is what allows for one to think about doing things they have not done before and it grows an individuals personal power or self confidence quietly.

Secondly if they choose to walk along that path to a goal they will inevitably hit one of their limiters. At this time they may hit it in such a way that enables them to overcome it or they may have gained enough trust to ask you for advice to help them with it.

In general you want to take them out of stagnation and engage movement in some direction. Just enough so that they can gain some personal momentum, increasing their own ability to grow themselves.

3. Become a Mirror to Shine their own Growth back to them

Once enough trust has been gained you want to be open enough that they will feel comfortable being equally open with you. The world seems to provide an abundance of negative influences to convince anyone that they ‘don’t possess what they want’ or that they are lacking in some way. People have to come to realise that such negativity has no value and only their own definitions matter.

Everything about being a mirror is about shining their own ability to create and grow back to them.

Help them to understand what they have already changed. To realise the full extent of the changes they have made to themselves and the barriers they have busted.

When their power becomes strong enough they will be able to rip down their own restrictions without your assistance and begin to experience the freedom possible.

4. Smile

Not everyone believes that happiness is always around and they refuse to approach the idea.

It’s important not to hide your own beliefs from such people. You do not want to be confrontational but you still want to let them and anyone who is around know that there is a choice.

Go forth and spread the word.

How do you approach enabling happiness and change?

Therefore you must manage your self development, you must have a plan. This post is going to provide an outline of what you need to do to manage your self development.

Create a golden statement

This is your dream of the person you want to be. It is an unrefined statement of who you want to be.

You can use an inspirational picture describing your living sensations or you can write a mission style statement entailing your commitment to yourself.

Know what you want

It is not enough to say that you want to be a better person. Saying that you want to be president of the world is more specific than that.

You need to write down the qualities that you wish to possess and the things that you want to be capable of doing.

Make plans

While you can read and dream about change as much as you want you must make actionable plans if you are to ever make real progress.

Making plans is where managing self development starts bringing results to life.

Take a look at all the things you want for yourself and outline the steps that you need to undertake in order to achieve them. This is where reading and research into self development is useful.

Setup a system

It is necessary to have a system that supports you in your self development and keeps you on track.

Have a daily, weekly or monthly system that involves the following:

• Reviewing what you want, your golden statement and your plans
• Identifying problems that are holding back your progress
• Creating solutions to solve the problems you have identified

With this system you can continually improve how you improve yourself. Consequently your rate of progress can increase exponentially.

How do you manage your self development?

It does not take a whole lot of effort to do good work and stay at pretty much the level in which you are at. However as I mentioned in Life Change is Hard Work, making fundamental alterations to yourself and contributions to society take real effort.

In trying to plan my actions I have been plagued by trying to satisfy all of lifes demands. I want to become a better person, I want to be really good at my job, etc, etc.

These are 2 reasons why I have not been able to go beyond and figure out a plan for myself.

1. Compromising on my single most important goal/purpose. Trying to extend it to fit everything that I could possibly want.
2. Complacency with my current progress, previous ’successes’.

Both are equally catastrophic but in this post I want to focus on point 2. The summation of my past.

The Past is Useless

It is easy to think ‘I am a good person’.

Easy to acknowledge that ‘I have come a long way’.

Easy to believe that ‘I always treat people kindly’.

Easy to comfort ourselves by ‘helping others the best we can’.

Indeed these statements have a certain amount of truth to them when seen from a particular viewpoint.

However all of them have at their root, complacency and laziness. They are self-serving, making us feel content with our efforts.

What they lack is the necessity of improvement.

When we say we are kind, then we consider ourselves good enough. When we help others to the best of our ability we think we are already doing all that we can possibly do.

It is with this background that I say that anything I have achieved today is useless to me.

Anything that I have learned in the past is already ingrained into my existence, I need not consider it.

The moment we have succeeded is when we finally fail.

When improvement stops we can be replaced by a machine; and should be for our arrogance.

Improvement is all that I need to concern myself with.

Is it the ability to think and analyse?

Is it the ability to gauge our progress?

Is it the ability to observe our thoughts and emotions?

Is it the ability to just be?

Is it the ability to question if this is all life is?

Is the most important skill different when we are at different stages of understanding?

Is there a time when no skill is necessary?

I don’t have an answer to these, in fact I probably benefit the most from not being able to conceive an answer.

But what do you think? What is the most important skill for you?

Do you know the freedom found when not bound by time? The peace to be at peace with that that is?

How many times do we find ourselves rushing around trying to meet all of our demands. The greatest shame in this is that we have our mind rushing along with our body.

This is unnecessary, we need to learn to live in a timeless fashion in a time centric world.

During my flight to India recently I was hit with a few examples of timelessness. The most interesting thing was that it was always nature providing these great examples of timelessness.

Although I first want to relate about what I saw, at the end I will tell you how to be timeless without the need of nature.

Koi Pond Secret Sanctuary

Recently I stopped over at Changi Airport in Singapore. I had a good 3 or 4 hours to spend and as it was my first time there I figured I would wonder around the airport.

Shops, shops shops! Free Internet, free video gaming, free movies. Like any other region that a lot of people pass through, retail had quite a prominent position.

Not being particularly interested in all these I kept wondering on until I ran into something wonderful.

A Koi pond (see above image). In the middle of this busy airport was a spot of timelessness.

The plants only breathed, their brilliance shining through their flowers as if they were totally oblivious to their own magnificence.

I sat and watched the Koi swim up and down the pond for awhile. They too traveled undisturbed by the hustle and bustle of the airport.

This reminded me of one of the islands that we had flown over a few hours ago. It was a relatively small one but what stood out was the massive mountain range that formed a ring, almost as big as the island itself.

The way it stood there so imposing and impenetrable made it rather awe-inspiring. Its sheer presence pushing beyond my own concept of time.

Yet in the same way, the tranquil koi also transcended this notion of time.

It just consisted of movement and air, perfect in its simplicity.

Discovering Timelessness

Although we are not mountains on an island, nor koi in a pond. We to can put timelessness into our lives, even into our ‘busy’ lives. Here are a few methods to begin to find that timelessness.

- STOP!

I could have said bring your attention to the now, leaving the past and the future behind but I think a lot people get this confused with being engrossed in the current activity.

Just stop what you are doing, then stop thinking (as much as possible relax the brain).

Now just look around at your surroundings. Notice the sounds, see the colours. Notice how everything remains either exactly as it is or flows from one form to another.

Stopping for a moment allows you to break free and recognise the timelessness of your current situation. Every situation!

- Engage the body but free the mind

Traveling to meetings/appointments is a great example of when we have a simple task to do and yet we have the mind running at full tilt.

Say you are walking to a meeting, rather than thinking about what you will say, what they will think or playing out full conversations just stop. Only stop your mind this time, keep walking.

As you are walking, not only perceive the colours and textures but mentally feel them. When you try to perceive with all your senses you force yourself closer to timelessness.

You become like the Koi. You travel through the pond unperturbed, moving because you are moving. You get to your destination not by thinking about it, but by moving.

Simply put, tell your body enough to get the job done and no more.

Doing this your activities will satisfy a time centric world but your mind will be free. When people see you they will believe that you have all the time in the world. Wether you look like a mountain range or a Koi is personal taste.

- Find things that appear to be timeless and study them

I feel natural items work better than say a iPod. They feel much more alive than their modern counterparts.

When you go about your day, pay attention to the things you see around you. Looking for things that specifically stand out as timeless..

If what you find is big, find some time in your days to visit it and watch it. If it is something small and purchasable buy it and put it somewhere where you will be often.

The more you feel the timelessness in your days the easier it will be to reach.

Life lived in a state receptive to the wonders of the world allows the wonders to manifest in yourself.

In this case I am not talking about the big things like family members dying, jobs being lost and relationships being destroyed.

Rather I am referring to the little things that don’t go as planned.

Notice that I did not say things that go wrong, but rather don’t go as we planned. This is a key point I want to talk about here along with how to change the way we think about these events.

Nothing Ever Goes Wrong

In life we will have all heard people complaining about things that went wrong in their day which caused them pain.

‘The bus was late’, ‘our client changed his mind at the last minute’, ‘the power went out and I lost all the data on my computer’.

But all of these statements arise from a preconceived idea of how the world should be.

We believe that buses arrive at scheduled times, that our house always has power.

Then when reality throws up something against what we believed we are so rigid in our thinking that we believe the external world has made a mistake, done something incorrect or wrong.

But the world is as it is in every moment.

There is no right way for the world to be, nor any wrong way.

We have to stop trying to put the world in a box in our heads.

More than Accepting Hardship: Cold Shower Please

When I arrived at my apartment in India I found that not only did I have a broken shower head such that half of the water went out the window but also that I had no hot water.

Watching myself I immediately saw thoughts and feelings of frustration and a host of other things.

Kicking them out I was able to see the reality of the situation.

For the next few days I had cold showers, no complaining, no annoyance, no problem.

This is different to accepting that you have to deal with only being able to have cold showers. From this view you are still harboring the desire for a hot shower.

What we really want is to be happy having a cold shower. Because it is simply a cold shower, it is as it is.

This is not doing any mental tricks so I can say ‘oh I’m grateful for having any water at all’ because then all you are doing is cultivating desire for water. When the water stops then you are back to square one again.

Clear the Mind and Heart and you will Clearly see the World

All the pain related to hardship comes from thoughts and emotions.

Clear them out and you will clearly see the world.

Then when you do not have hot water you may not even have a cold shower, you will simply be washing.

Embrace freedom.

It is like battling the mind with the mind. It cannot fundamentally change itself, only move things around.

With effort we can manage to overpower our negative thoughts for awhile. But eventually new situations will come up, things bad enough that all those negative elements will come flooding forth again.

Common thought is that there are only two ways that we can be internally. We either have negative thoughts, negative feelings or we can have positive thoughts and positive feelings.

This leads people to say that the best way to act is through some method or another to modify or replace the negative ones. Using some mental method to change our perspective on them such that we see the positive in the negative.

These people are correct, we are going to be happier (atleast some of the time) by focusing on the positive. Looking on the bright side of life if you like. But it does not deal with the issue of the negative elements within. It does not allow us to discover even greater peace and happiness.

A Better Way – Awareness

There is another way, a better way. This is to be aware in the world, in the present moment.

In this way we break beyond thoughts and feelings and they no longer have the strangle hold on us that they once had.

Being aware like this we can see what our thoughts and feelings are really like. We can realise that the difference between a positive thought and a negative thought is purely in our perception of them.

As we watch we learn more about each thought and feeling. This is not an intellectual learning, it is a matter of observation and directly perceiving.

We see things that we didn’t know were so before. We see underlying motivations for thoughts that we used to think were of the highest good and intention. When we first formed them we went along, not even realising that such underlying motivations existed below the surface.

Thoughts Good or Bad Distract us

In reality no thought, plan or intention that you have is really good or bad in itself. The only purpose it serves is to distract us from really perceiving the world.

When we go beyond our thoughts and feelings we begin to perceive how it all works and we discover a new way of living. A way that enables radical change.

By perceiving thoughts we gain an understanding of what each one is really about. Which enables us to talk to others and share this new understanding.

We begin to appreciate the freedom possible in this new way of living.

So next time you see a negative thought, don’t try to turn it around or replace it with a new ‘positive’ one. Simply look at it. Don’t think about it or analyse it. Just watch, inquire with something beyond the mind.

Practice this and you will see a new way of living, free of battling thought with thought, emotion with emotion.

Rather than trying to create a bigger and bigger fire for light you will find the light switch.