Tag Archives: perception

Work Towards Success

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It is no secret some of us are working at jobs we dislike. We are working for a paycheck because job satisfaction is sorely lacking. Bills have to be payed, our home has to be maintained, and life has to be managed. It may not be the greatest job in the world, but it happens to be the only job we have at the moment.

How great it would be if one day soon we discovered that we worked our way right out of our job and into a better one! Suddenly spending most of each week at a job would be more exciting than the agony of collecting a paycheck. If only it would happen.

It can and does happen every day to people like you and me. Every day someone wakes up and heads off to work to find that they no longer have to do the job that gets a paycheck. Instead they have been moved or promoted into a job that has some meaning, and feels good walking out the door after the day is done.

The most important part of improving any work situation is creating and following a plan for your working future. Creating a plan to move from point A to point B at work keeps out work distraction and tracks how well the plan is working. Update and modify the plan as needed.

In general do work you are supposed to be doing, and any extra work that is important to your Boss when you have free time, and skip the rest. One of the biggest stumbling blocks holding people back from being selected for raises  or promotion is not doing work which is important to your Boss. Your Boss not only signs off on your time card every week and manages your performance, your Boss also has influence on your working future.

Your Boss generally expects you to accomplish a specific list of tasks and some general tasks too. These primary tasks should be the focus of a day at work. Doing your best can have a big payoff. Performing a task that is not important to your Boss while neglecting primary responsibility leaves a lasting impression with your Boss, and it is negative.

Become an expert at your job if possible. In most cases there is always more to learn about your job. If you are not an expert on your job, ask your coworkers about those things you do not know about your job. Dig down into the details. Most people like to show off how much they know, so finding a willing audience is a breath of fresh air for them.

Look for smarter, better, or faster ways to accomplish tasks. As the workday progresses, imagine other ways of doing the work. Whether any ideas really are faster or better, is not as important as the process of thinking about how the work is done and can be done better.

As technology changes there is are always possibilities of identifying new ways of doing the same old task. If the new way makes the task faster or better capture it, and discuss it with your Boss when the opportunity is there. All it takes is one second in a workday for a flash of insight to help you step out of the crowd and into the limelight.

Manage your relationship with your Boss. Perception is important to your Boss. Your Boss may only have a general idea about what kind of worker you are. Make sure the perception your Boss has of you is as polished as it can be. Show up for work a few minutes early and stay a few minutes late. Talk with the people on other shifts. Speaking with people who do the same work at a different time, may know something worth knowing.

A few  minutes a day invested in making friends across shifts can have unexpected benefits. If nothing else, more people get to know your name, and may share important  information with you, as you share information with them.

Just as you should leave your work at work, leave your personal life at the door too. It is much better to keep conversation general, and keep your personal life personal. All of your Coworkers have conversations with your Boss too. Once something personal is shared, there is no way to recall something that should not have been said.

No matter the result of any calendar period, making and following a work plan, lay the foundation for the future. Skills are honed, knowledge is gained, and new skills are developed that may help in landing a new job at a different company. Nothing is wasted at work except time. Make the most of work time, and let that time create new options for your working future.

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Dancing Bears We Never See

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I was reading about the Rihanna Umbrella nonsense about one of her songs with the evil lyrics the song contains. Someone has a wild imagination and too much time on their hands. There was a bright side to skimming the story though.

Reading that dribble led me to think about a trip to a park a few years back. I had taken two of my Grandsons to a park. I looked around at all the people at the park with their families enjoying the afternoon and enjoying being with each other, having fun. There were families who were at the park, but no having fun and definitely not enjoying each others company.

The youngest Grandchild’s focus was on perceived ‘Gang Bangers’ (his words). He thought the park was full of them to the exclusion of everyday families enjoying the nice weather, and warm lazy day we had. He was so focused on Gang Bangers real or imagined, he became anxious. This Grandson sure either we were going to be attacked because we weren’t part of a Gang, or a gunfight was going to break out at any second and we would be in the crossfire.

The other Grandson was pretty quiet for the most part. It took a little while to figure out why. He was enthralled with all the young, his age, women at the park. Those young Women were all he could see. He was oblivious to families, ‘Gang Bangers, and the afternoon.

Of course I noticed a few young men who could have been gang members, and I certainly noticed more than one or more pretty women. If the Grandkids noticed anything other than what they were focused on they did not mention it.

I am sure everybody reading this has watched at least one, “Men in Black” movie. The movie is loosely about aliens in New York, along with the alien airport situated among millions of New Yorker’s who never seem to have noticed. Those few who did notice had memories erased. The Men in Black were right there with their memory erasers, ensuring the secret did not get out.

I remember a watching video (maybe 2 if I have them mixed up) where you are told to watch how many times a basketball ball is passed back and forth in a group setting. After the video is over, you read a Dancing Bear waltzed through the group, and myself like most people do not see it. I had to watch the video a number of times because when I was not focusing on the ball being passed, it was incredible how obvious it was.

In a recent movie where Jeff Bridges plays a worn out Country Singer who finds something good for once. Along the way, Bridge’s character loses a four year old boy in a mall setting. Out of desperation he informs mall security, and the first question mall security asked is, “What was the boy wearing?” Of course Jeff’s character did not know, he was focused on the boy and not his clothes until that moment.

Speaking of credibility, the net is also full of documented cases of how poor we are when it comes to being an eye witness. If you find that idea odd, think about someone close to you, and what they were wearing the last time you saw them.

Why this happens is to keep us from being overwhelmed by everything happening around us. We create an idea of how everything should be and that is what we see. In the example of the people passing the ball back and forth we do not expect to see someone in a bear suit dancing through the group, so we do not. What clothes someone is wearing are not as important as what their expression is, or how and what they are saying, so we block it out.

This idea really has me wondering how much happens around us that we never notice because it is something we do not expect to see. Maybe those few moments in our life where we witness something we can not explain, an apparition, ghost, monster, whatever it is, maybe they are more common than we think. Maybe because we do not expect to see anything unusual we do not?

The same applies to what some of us read. Two people can read the same small book, and one person struggles to get through it, while the second person another wonders if they ever really will get through the book with all the amazing insight the pages contain.

The same idea also applies to our world and our problems. We see our problems the way we have always seen them. We solve them in whatever manner we have always solved problems. It works so why change it.

What would happen if when the next problem happens, we look for a Bear dancing through the center? You may not see a Bear, but when the same type of problems repeat over and over like a television rerun, perhaps trying to see it as if you have never had the problem before will help you see it in a new way?

Maybe after seeing the problem in a new way, a new solution will be found and the problem will go away for good? Maybe better yet, looking for the dancing bear in the problem may lead to the realization that the problem is not a problem at all, but rather an opportunity?

A problem turning into a dancing bear situation is definitely something we are not used to seeing. Perhaps we need to start looking for the dancing bear. Who knows where it will lead if we solve a few problems and then start looking for dancing bears other places.

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Holdem, vision, perception, and groceries

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Here I am writing about something that I thought I would never be doing again. Playing poker…. I wrote a few months ago that Holdem had become too serious and the players were playing at least as well I do. What this did was turn Holdem into a matter of luck, who was going to be the luckiest in the next few hours. When I wrote that post I was absolutely certain  I was not going to be playing Holdem again.

As life would have it, some things never really change, even though most things do. Some weeks ago the weather was terrible for longer than I can sit in the house and do nothing. I had been using Holdem simulator software for fun, and I had changed the way I was playing. It was making a difference even though it did not seem correct for the table conditions I thought I was playing against at the poker room.

Poker is like chess, or any other game of skill, where the players are evenly matched at the beginning. For every strategy there is an equally effective counter strategy. My problem with my game was the game had changed and my strategy did not. For those of you who play Holdem, I started out again at $2-4, and now have a bankroll to move up to $4-8. I am showing a win in most sessions, although that is all relative, and means little other than I can play a little bigger when I wish.

It is always easier to see what is going on from the outside, when we are not personally involved in the situation. I think this is a lot like our eyesight. Over our whole development as human beings it was important for men to see a long distance and not close up. For women it was more important to have fine detail vision for close up tasks. I imagine this was because of the division of the tasks that were done. The men hunted, and the women gathered, made clothes and such.

My thinking is my little hiatus from Holdem gave me a chance to step back an look at the situation from a distance. What I had been doing was using my fine vision and expecting different results from doing the same things. The results over time may not have been that bad, but they were not have been optimal.

The same is true in our work. If you look around with a detached manner at the people in almost any work place, you find people using their fine vision performing their activities. Because they are looking at a very small picture of their work, they are missing out on the bigger rewards that they should be working towards.

For example, if you there are two similar stores of any type in your vicinity that both have the same products, say a grocery store, you usually have a favorite. Using our fine vision, reasons why we prefer one store over the other are varied. The prices are cheaper, the store is newer, parking is easier, and the list goes on and on.

This is usually the reason people feel they like one business better than another, but it is not always the truth. It may well be that if on the same day, if I walked into one grocery store and bought twenty items, and then drove to the store I did not like as well, and bought the same twenty items, the second store may have the same or cheaper prices.  So there goes any arguments for why we prefer one grocery store over another.

What really goes on is with our fine vision we enjoy the way the stock people or cashiers talk to us when we interact with them. Using our distance vision, and distancing ourselves from the situation it is easy to see the only real difference is service. If our favorite cashiers leave the store, we may find we do not like our favorite store as much anymore. In fact, the prices (really the way we are being treated) are getting higher, and the competitions prices start to look better to us. What a difference a little distance makes in how we perceive our world.

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Wisdom in an English village

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I met a man in a village in England some years ago. I was trying to hitch a ride in a small village, traveling to the coast for some sightseeing. I was standing on the road side when he approached me and asked where I was headed. On a side note, it is obvious when we are visitors to another country, but not always obvious we live six states away from where we are standing.

Natural curiosity gets the best of people and I thought this man was no different. He asked me where I was going, so I told him. Then he asked me where I started from and I told him where I was staying. He then asked me if I like the people where I was staying, and I said, yes, I thought they were very friendly people. The man then asked me what type of people did I expect to meet when I arrived at my destination? I replied I did not know how they would be.

The man changed the subject and asked about where I lived in the United States? I told him, and he followed up with another question about how did I like the people back home? I said, I liked the people back home; I thought they were nice people, they usually offered help when they could, and they were generally good people who try to do the right things.

Once again the man changed the subject and offered that perhaps I would find the people where I was going to as good as the people I already knew? I thought about this for a few seconds, and decided it may be a possibility, and offered up the people in the next town were more likely to be good people than stand off type of people. The man laughed and said, the people I met would be just the people I expected to meet. I asked him why he thought this, and he said, because I seemed a friendly person, I could expect that most people I would meet would be friendly to me.

I thought about this, and asked him why this would be? He replied that no matter where we go in life, the people around us generally do nothing more than reflect back who we are. Because I seemed a happy person, most people would act happy around me. In my lack of any real perspective on this, I had to take the man on his word. I told him, that was quite an insight on people and was he a psychologist or psychiatrist? He said no, he was unemployed, but generally did odd jobs and minor carpentry when he could get it. I then asked him if he traveled a lot? He told me no, he had never been farther than three towns away from his home in his life.

I forgot this man and his wisdom that day as I enjoyed new sights and sounds by the English seashore. It took me many years to appreciate the wisdom of his conversation though. On that day, as I walked on trying to hitch a ride, I thought what a silly person he was. Him never having been anywhere really, never even leaving the area he lived in, what could he possibly know about the world? An expert on human relations who had never been more than fifty miles from home! I know now what he knew, and what he told me turned out to be so very true, he knew a lot more about the world than I did, even though he had barely been away from home in his lifetime.

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