What winning at work should look like
What does winning, and more specifically, what does winning at work mean?
If you think of winning in the traditional, one-size-fits-all way, winning looks or sounds like:
An important title or highly visible status or position
A large amount of money, or higher-than-average salary
A larger-than-average home
Ability to purchase as many brand name or high-dollar consumables - food, car, clothes, vacations - as you want
Power and influence over others
But, I ask you to consider the concept of ‘winning’ from a different perspective - by considering what it would mean for you to lose.
What do you have in your life right now that you’d be absolutely gutted if you lost? Like, so messed up about this thing or part of your life being gone that you might not ever get over it?
Close your eyes for a few moments and let yourself imagine what that thing is and how it might feel to lose it.
Got it?
That thing - whether it was a relationship, your home, your health, or whatever you imagined…
I now want you to ask yourself this:
Is my job helping me keep this or have more of this?
Or,
is my job helping me lose this or have less of this?
Is your job adding to or taking away from what you want most?
If you answered that your job is adding more of this to your life, Congrats!
This is likely your reward for being conscious enough of your values to find the right fit job or workplace for you.
Now, for the rest of us...
If your job isn’t helping you to have more of the things in your life that you don’t want to lose, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your job is bad. But more than likely, you’ve never really stopped to ask yourself this question about your job and what it could be causing you to lose or put at risk. Maybe you didn’t know that you could or should? Maybe you didn’t even feel like you had the right to ask this question.
The truth is: almost all of us think that winning in life and winning at work is like winning a race: The first to the finish with the most medals gets to the stand highest on the podium at the end, with the whole crowd cheering from the stands.
But if life really is a race, there’s only one place that race ends, and we are all guaranteed to make it there.
It’s death.
And, if death is the finish line, why would anyone want to be first? And why are we all trying to bring along so much stuff?
When you die, even if you had a lot of stuff, a lot of really nice stuff, that stuff is not what’s going be ‘on program’ at your funeral
The people you cared for, shared with, created with, grew with, experienced triumph, tragedy and laughter with, those you helped and those who helped you will be.
And when those people go to the podium to speak, they will tell stories. They will not list off accomplishments or titles or bank account balances, (what a terrible funeral that would be!) but stories.
Have you ever listened to a friend tell a really good story about you?
Here’s a clip from one of my favorite movies, ‘Death Proof’ (total coincidence, I promise), where Rosario Dawson’s character Abernathy is telling a story about Zoe Bell, aka, ‘Zoe the Cat’. (Warning: Language)
Hearing yourself as the main character in a story told by someone who likes you and gets you, is pretty cool. You get to see yourself from a different perspective. You get to see what people value most about you. You get a look at yourself in an accurate mirror.
I think we can agree by now that accomplishments and stuff alone aren’t enough to consider yourself a winner at life or at work.
So, if your work is giving you the chance to collect lots of stuff, but isn’t also giving you the chance to have more of what you value most, nor is it giving you the chance to create or hear the stories you want to hear about yourself... then what is it there for? And how can you move from just accomplishing or amassing to actually winning?
