23 years ago, Steve Farber and I started out in the training business together. We were both teaching writing workshops to employees at AT&T (believe it or not!) and counseling each other on the potential directions of our respective careers.
A short time later, I met my mentor, Jack Canfield, and Steve met his-management guru and business legend, Tom Peters, of In Search of Excellence fame. And our lives and careers took off on different-though parallel-tracks.
In time, I went on to speak and write in the self-development field, while Steve focused his attention on the hardcore world of business.
So, isn’t it interesting that we’ve ended up today in a similar place: my work is about Love for No Reasonas a way of life, and Steve’s work is about Love as the foundation for business and what he calls,Extreme Leadership (which he’s written about extensively in his remarkable books, The Radical Leap Re-Energized and Greater Than Yourself.
The Extreme Leader’s Credo, Steve says, is Do What You Love in the Service of People Who Love What You Do.
“It’s simple, really,” Steve told me. “Good business starts with your own personal connection to the work you do everyday: are you doing what you love?”
Good question!
Here are Steve’s 4 Steps to Finding the Love in Your Work. Use these to light your fire at work:
1. Remember Why You Took this Job: Think back over the course of your career so far and recount the events, jobs, projects etc. that led up to your beginning your current work. Then write your answer to these questions: Why did I take this job/start this company/enlist in this program? Are the ideals that I started with still in place today? If not, how can I re-enliven them?
2. List Every Aspect of Your Current Work/Job/Career: Make a quick inventory of all the various aspects of your work: tasks, projects, roles, responsibilities, colleagues, higher-ups, employees, customers, clients, underlying values, etc. Write it however works best for you. Categorize if you’d like; or don’t. However you do it, you should be able to look at the finished product and see all the aspects of your work life at the present time.
3. Highlight What and Whom You’re Grateful For: Use a highlighter to emphasize the items on your list that really resonate with you-those things you love doing, the people you truly care about, the values that you strive to live by-and make coming to work worthwhile. As for the items that don’t get highlighted, well, that’s life. We all have to do things that we don’t love doing in order to do the overall work that we love. (I, for example, don’t love waiting in airports, making sales calls, and tracking expenses). We have a technical term for doing those things anyway. It’s called, “being an adult.”
4. Review Your Highlights Everyday: Once a day-ideally in the morning before things get rolling-review your list and focus on the highlights. Allow yourself to feel genuine gratitude for the things, activities, and people that populate your working experience. That one simple, reflective practice should help to stoke or re-kindle the love in your heart for the work you do.
Experiment with these steps for the next few days and see if it gets you closer to that ideal of Doing What You Love in the Service of People Who Love What You Do.
With Love for No Reason and Every Reason,
Marci Shimoff
If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love Marci’s class in AVAIYA’s FREE Believe & Receive Course. Watch it here!
Learn more about the extraordinary Marci Shimoff at: http://marcishimoffblog.com/