See here for parts one and two of this series.

For the last three weeks, we’ve been talking about the feelings of stress and joy as they relate to work. If you feel stress in the context of work, hopefully you have better insight into what exactly you feel stressed about. Ideally you can also better identify the aspects of work that are joyful for you.

The goal is to move towards a work environment where the dominant feeling for you goes from stress to something closer to joy or satisfaction—not necessarily that you love going to work all the time, but when you do work, most of the time you are glad you did.

This week, I want to offer a set of frameworks that may help you begin to make that transition and start to take actions that you have been consciously or subconsciously resisting.

Mindsets

Before we dive into mindsets, let’s recap the sources of stress we discussed and how I see them mapping to sources of joy:

Source of Stress	Source of Joy
Toxic environment	People
Time commitment	Purpose, meaning, contribution and service
Fear of failure	Pride, challenge
Work is a bad deal	Good money
Boredom	Interest

Not all the sources of stress are going to be resolved with a mindset change. For example, if you work in a toxic environment and one of your big motivators is being around people you like, then you don’t need a mindset change, you just need to find a new job where the work culture suits you better.

However, in some of the other cases, viewing your situation through a different lens may help you to take the actions needed to change your situation. 

The highest and best use of your time

I am going to get mystical on you for a second.

I believe that each of us is here for a reason. Whether a higher power deliberately put us here or there’s some other explanation, I don’t quite believe that we are all here as a totally random, emergent property of the universe. Each of us is meant to do something or be something.

From this point of view, I like to ask myself if what I am doing is the “highest and best use of my time.” What I mean by that is that each of us has a set of talents, skills, personality traits, life experience, and relationships that are unique, valuable and can be used in many ways.

Is the way in which I am currently using my unique set of gifts the highest and best way that they could be used?

This question is subjective and deeply personal. “Highest and best” doesn’t necessarily mean the avenue that earns the most money—it could be impact on the most number of people, largest possible impact on a single person, going to a place where your skill is badly needed, etc. With that said, in the capitalist, for-profit world, impact and rewards are usually correlated.

I suspect that many people who are “playing it safe” are not engaging in the highest and best use of their time. The blockers are the usual ones—fear and inertia.

Living to our fullest potential always involves risk and emotional hardship.

I can get anything I want, but not everything

This is about accepting sacrifice and tradeoffs.

Looking back to the sources of joy, you can get the ones that are most important to you but you probably won’t be able to get everything on the list. In particular, money and free time are usually at odds, because making a lot of money typically requires you to be excellent at what you do and being excellent consumes time.

For example, if you want to make $500,000 as a yoga teacher, it’s certainly possible. But you will probably have to make large sacrifices in terms of time for personal education (both yoga and business), marketing, making tons of social media content, perhaps moving to a more lucrative market, taking the risk of launching a studio, waiting for many years to turn your studio into a multi-state franchise, etc. You can have the money, but you have to give something up.

All that said, I believe there are Pareto optimal improvements for most people. This comes back to engaging in the highest and best use of your time. If you clearly aren’t making the best use of the talents you have been given, you probably will be able to get significantly more money without compromising too much elsewhere.

Practice makes perfect

Everyone knows this saying but it bears repeating, especially for the insecure overachievers.

I believe there’s a link between the fear of failure and the satisfaction and pride between competing and winning. I think a lot of the insecure overachiever types (myself included) are secretly pretty competitive people. Our self-image is simply so fragile that we haven’t learned to tolerate the downside risk of doing something hard or competitive, which is losing or failing. In other words, many insecure overachievers are competitive people functioning at a low level.

There is only one antidote to this and it’s repeated effort (practice). If you are stressed out about the possibility of making a mistake at work, the only way to address that is to DO MORE. Write more pieces. Visit more customers. Make more calls. More more more.

Not only does the work become easier, but we start to build the calluses against rejection and failure.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Noticing

What parts of this piece made me uncomfortable? To what extent am I falling short of holding a mindset that I want to hold?

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a mindset I discussed here.

2)      Thought exercise

Imagine for a moment that you fully held the mindset you chose in #1.

If I truly believed [chosen mindset], how would my actions be different from the way I act today?

3)      Test drive

What is the smallest step I can take to try on to implement the mindset I thought about in #2?

It doesn’t have to be something big! For example, if you wanted to adopt a daily affirmation related to the mindset, I would say even that is too big. I would rather you try the affirmation tomorrow morning, or for a week, and see how it feels.