Last year I spent a good month or two complaining…about everything. Kids,work, my parents, my mother-in-law, my husband, the economy…you name it no one escaped being part of my discontent. My friend Gretchen, had heard enough. In the middle of one of my rants, about something that had tweaked me, she threw her hands up in the air and said, “STOP! Laura don’t you know you make your own happiness. It isn’t dependent on someone else.” That night I thought about what she said; sat down and wrote down all the things that irked me. The one’s I could change were given an action plan to correct or change, the one’s I couldn’t change because they were really someone else’s issue not mine….I scratched out and purged them from my internal disconnect file. It really is a cathartic thing to do.
So why the unveiling here in this blog? I stumbled across the article, “Feeling Blah About Work? Don’t Blame Your Boss–Get Engaged,” by Timothy R. Clark.
The first line of his article is, “As an employee, you have three choices: Accept what you’ve been given, change what you’ve been given, or leave what you’ve been given. We want to focus on the second option. If you feel underused and undervalued, you can do something about it. “
Basically you make your own happiness at work too. Shared, personal responsibility for your level of productivity at work. I love this! Too many times we focus on how the manager can engage the employee, even the one’s that are “retired at work”, and there is not much discussion about what the employees’ responsibility is for their engagement/productivity.
As I get ready for a week off in July, I’ve added Mr. Clark’s book, The Employee Engagement Mindset: The Six Drivers for Tapping into the Hidden Potential of Everyone in Your Company, to my summer reading list.
March 11, 2013 at 2:25 pm
Reblogged this on MANAGING SMARTER and commented:
Along the lines of self-awareness