Episode 23: Managing You

Hello my friends, welcome to episode 23.

It is easy in our lives to get ideas about how other people need to behave and what other people need to do.

And most of the time we want others to behave in a certain way so we can feel good about ourselves and we can feel good about them.

Now, this gets us into trouble because other people don’t behave the way we think they should.

Other people want to do things their way.

They view the world in a different way than we do and so they do things according to that viewpoint.

Often, we are trying to manage other people instead of managing ourselves.

So, if we have a belief that things should be efficient as possible in our job.

But we have coworkers that like to catch up in the morning or they have a lot of questions about the job that they don’t understand or they think that we must follow a particular workflow even if it is inefficient.

What most of us do in this situation is try to manage our coworkers.

We get frustrated and try to avoid certain coworkers.

We might try to get them to change by trying to tell them that certain things don’t matter.

We may try changing the project workflow to make it more efficient.

We may complain to our boss or other coworkers about it.

We may try to build templates or checklists to try and change the way they are doing their work.

And some of these things may be effective but generally, I find that we put a lot of energy into trying to change other people and very little energy into taking a look at ourselves.

We try to manage up – manage those above us.  

We try to manage sideways – manage those beside us.

We generally don’t try to manage ourselves. And ourselves are really the only thing we need to manage.

Now yes if you are a parent or a people manager at work you may have some work to do managing other people but for most of us, we do try to manage others but we really need to take a step back and manage ourselves.

And even parents and people managers could start first by managing themselves

I read an interesting article the other day that was very against the philosophy that thoughts create your feelings because what the author had noticed was that often when someone follows this philosophy and they see that someone isn’t getting the result that they want they will tell them just to think different. Often they will believe that they know how the other person should think and therefore they know what the other person should start thinking to be able to have a different result.

This is what we do when we try to manage other people.

We think that we know how they should think.

We think that if they change then everything will be better.

We want them to change so we don’t have to manage ourselves.

But there are 2 problems with this.

1.       Others don’t want to be managed and they clearly view the situation differently they you do and therefore are reacting or simply acting from that viewpoint. Many times when we are trying to manage others we do not take the time to understand the world from how they see it. We just simply try to change them and this leads to problem number 2.

2.       You can’t change them. Trying to change others is a bit like herding cats. They all have a mind of their own. They will all go in different directions as they please. You really don’t have any power here.

So how do we let others live, act, feel as they will, and simply manage ourselves?

3 tips for managing yourself.

1.       Recognize that often the changes that we want others to make are often the things we need to do ourselves. So be introspective. Take a look at the reason you want to manage the other person. The reason you think they are doing it wrong. Question your definitions of how things should be.

2.       Take a look at what is in your control? Your thinking, your feelings, your responses.

3.       What is effective? We spend a lot of time asking what is right or what is wrong. But I think a more important question is what is effective.

Give it a try this week.

Look at where you can just manage you.

Where you can process your emotion.

Where you can allow others to have the experience that they want to have.

It will be fun.

Have a wonderful week.