Episode 57: The Art of Being a Good Employee - Sentences You Work From

Hello my friends, welcome to episode 57, thanks for joining me here today.

I titled today’s episode Sentences you work from.

Now let’s explore this a little.

How do you describe your job to someone who knows nothing about your company?

How do you describe your job to a new employee?

How do you describe your job to your trusted friend or co-worker?

Were these descriptions all the same?

Were these descriptions vastly different?

Sometimes we love our jobs and sometimes we hate them.

Sometimes we tell really positive stories about our jobs and sometimes it is hard to hear a reason that you would stay.

So this is what we are exploring today.

What is the sentence that you work from?

If you don’t know the let’s do an exercise to uncover them. Now I highly recommend that you take some time with each of these questions. Consider them from the different perspectives that we just talked about – how you would answer if you were promoting your job and how you would answer with that trusted coworker who knows and experiences the same things you do.

What are your negative thoughts about work?

What are your worries at work?

What isn’t working at work?

Why isn’t it working?

What do you think about your job?

What do you think about your mental and physical related to your job?

How are you showing up at work?

Where are you not showing up at work?

Why are you not showing up?

What do you secretly think about your job?

Where are you struggling the most?

What is missing in your job or your work life?

Now as you contemplate these questions – do you see any patterns?

Do you see any common sentences or ways of thinking that are showing up in the way you describe your job or see the world?

These are the sentences you are working from.

Now, why do these matter?

They matter so much!

This is your job mindset.

This job mindset affects your contribution, it affects your joy, it affects how you show up, it affects your progress, and it affects literally everything.

This will be the reason you find great success and great joy in your job.

Or this will be the reason that you don’t perform well, or have the need to jump between jobs.

You need to know these sentences.

And you have control over them.

Once you know them.

You can keep them.

Or you can change them.

The choice is yours.

So let’s look at a few examples that I commonly hear.

We don’t have enough help/we are short-handed.

Now you may say – Christina, this is a fact. This project requires 5 people and they only have 3 people hired.

Maybe that is true but we have to separate the numbers from the drama. 3 is the number, not enough is the drama.

We can work with 3 people, be content with it, and still be actively looking for 2 more.

So we have to look at - Who are you when you think this?

How creative are you when you think that?

How much do you enjoy your job?

Are you efficient and effective at your job?

How do you feel at work?

If these things are not positive and are not having you show up as your best self, then maybe working from the mindset of we are short-handed isn’t working for you.

What could you try instead?

We will get the most important things done

We have just the right team.

We will have the right people. When we need them, they will come.

Again who would you be if you thought something like one of these options?

Is that better for you and your company or worse?

Let’s consider another one:

We have to get this all done today/we have an unreasonable workload/I can’t get it all done

Again you may say – this is a fact and again I would ask you who are you when you think this?

Are you your best self or your worst self?

Now this one I have seen in action.

I have processed a lot of cattle over the years and worked with a lot of crews.

The number of cattle we can handle in a day varies widely. Now some of this has to do with the amount of work for each animal – when we were tattooing our purebred calves, each animal took a bit more time than a simple revaccination.

But Mindset mattered just as much as the job.

When we believe that it could be done and we had the time – we made it happen.

When we believed that there was no way it would happen – we didn’t make it happen, more breaks, longer lunches, fewer requests for help or support, and more wasting time.

Now, this may seem very strange that people who believe that they don’t have enough time, waste time but it happens all the time.

So the art of being a good employee is knowing what sentences or mindset you are working from.

Let’s explore your mindset.

It will be fun.

Have a wonderful week.