Career: How to Get Unstuck at Work
- Know Your Stuff.
Okay this sounds a bit vague, so let’s clarify what we mean by “stuff.” Top performers put regular effort into ensuring that they are good at the technical aspects of their jobs. If their job is to sort lumber, they fall asleep at night pondering sorting strategies. If they’re in marketing, then they voraciously acquire the best marketing knowledge available. You get the picture. They work hard at honing their craft.
- Focus on the Right Stuff.
In addition to performing their craft well, top performers contribute to tasks that are essential to the organization’s success. This is important to grasp. Not all contributions are equal. Highly valued employees help manage what Stanford University’s Jeffrey Pfeffer calls the company’s “critical uncertainties.”
If a company is having trouble manufacturing its product, top performers find a way to help resolve that problem. If the firm is fighting legal challenges, top performers apply their specific expertise to that issue. If nobody has figured out how to market the product, top performers are hip deep in solving that problem.
And how do top performers get these mission-critical assignments? First, they are intensely interested in understanding where the organization is going (with emphasis on the key challenges). They study their own company. Next (and this is their true genius) they equip themselves to make their best and highest contribution to the core elements of where their company is going. Top performers work on their skill set and their access to critical tasks.
A company is having trouble manufacturing its product, top performers find a way to help resolve that problem. If the firm is fighting legal challenges, top performers apply their specific expertise to that issue. If nobody has figured out how to market the product, top performers are hip deep in solving that problem.
And how do top performers get these mission-critical assignments? First, they are intensely interested in understanding where the organization is going (with emphasis on the key challenges). They study their own company. Next (and this is their true genius) they equip themselves to make their best and highest contribution to the core elements of where their company is going. Top performers work on their skill set and their access to critical tasks.
- Build a Reputation for Being Helpful.
But doing your job well and ensuring that you’re helping deal with the company’s most important challenges isn’t enough. It’s necessary but insufficient. Individuals who are singled out by their colleagues as the go-to folks in the company are also widely known across their teams and sometimes even their entire organizations. They are far more likely than average to be recognized by name, and, more importantly, people describe them as experts who are generous with their time.
Taking time to help their co-workers puts top performers at the hub of important networks. Take note: This is not your typical networking observation. Top performers don’t get to know people simply to build an impressive collection of business cards. Theirs is not primarily a self-serving motivation. Top people are widely known and respected by others not because of their frequent contact, charm, or likability, but because they help others solve their problems.
Weight Loss: How to Lose Weight and Get Fit—and Stay That Way
- Before You Begin a Diet or Exercise Program, Assess Your Overall Health.
This one everyone knows. Visit with your doctor to make sure your plans are safe, and don’t take on too big a challenge all at once. Make sure you’re healthy enough to start a weight-loss and fitness program.
- Eat Better and Eat Less.
Most people already know this. Exactly what foods you choose is constantly debated, but one fact isn’t. You’ll need to eat fewer calories than you burn. There are thousands of diet tips and recipes to consider to help you do this. But let’s cut through the fads and keep the simple truth in mind—take in fewer calories than you burn and you’ll lose weight. How you do this will involve customizing a change plan to yourself.
- Include a Mix of Stretching, Strengthening, and Cardiovascular Activities.
These can take a million forms—including walking, vacuuming, taking the stairs, yoga, Pilates, push-ups, sit-ups, and lifting weights. Again, there are thousands of exercise tips and regimens to consider. They may give you ideas for ways to make your exercise more fun and effective and can certainly provide you with a good starting point. Find one or a combination that you can actually enjoy and keep up over the years.
Addiction: How to Take Back Your Life
- Say No. Since all addictions will eventually be solved by not engaging in the bad habit, the first and most important vital behavior is to say no.
Suggesting that you need to resist temptation by saying no is simple enough to do, but actually resisting the temptation can seem impossible—for all the reasons we’ve just described. Nobody is going to be saying at this point, “At last, now I know what to do. I need to stop putting cigarettes in my mouth. What was I thinking?” The power of nominating “say no” as the first and most important vital behavior comes with the six-source plan that will motivate and enable you to do so.
- Engage in Incompatible Activities.
This next high-leverage action isn’t so obvious. It involves distraction. Psychologist and addiction expert Stanton Peele suggests that recovering addicts need to engage in a meaningful activity that is incompatible with their current addiction. Dropping an addiction leaves a chasm. It’s essential that you fill that hole with an incompatible activity—something that will absorb your time and interest, carry you on to higher accomplishments, and make it difficult for you to give in to your cravings.
We can’t tell you exactly what your distraction technique should be, but we can learn from Mimi Silbert, the head of San Francisco’s Delancey Street (a residential program designed to help convicted felons and drug addicts turn their lives around). Since Delancey Street sports a better than 90 percent success rate, when Mimi talks, we ought to listen.
“You’ve got to get addicts out of their head,” Mimi suggests. “For most of their lives they’ve thought about one thing—their own wants and cravings. So we assign each new resident another person to watch over. As our residents learn to care for others, they fill the void of their former addiction.”
So, avoid focusing on your own cravings by focusing on others’ needs and challenges. For instance, Lee started a blog to describe his journey to recovery—and help others do the same. As the weeks passed, Lee had more than a hundred people following his story—many of whom joined him in kicking a bad habit of their own. Working on his daily blog entries began to occupy Lee’s attention in a way that both distracted him from his cravings and reminded him of why he wanted to drop the habit in the first place.
This second vital behavior helps in another way. Recovering addicts often spend a considerable amount of time blaming themselves and being criticized by others, and their self-esteem suffers. However, when they help another person succeed, it can go a long way toward helping them earn back their self-respect.
- Become Physically Active.
There is a third vital behavior for overcoming addictions, and although the science isn’t completely settled yet, contemporary research into brain activity is so promising, we’d be foolish to overlook it. The latest science suggests that as you start to lay out your personal plan, you should include physical activity. You can walk, run, swim, climb stairs—any form of aerobic exercise appears to help.
How does physical activity help with addictions? Think about the symptoms you feel when your cravings are really kicking in: nervousness, anxiety, sweaty palms, and an upset stomach. A quick-step walk around the block will often eliminate most of these symptoms. Plus physical activity seems to reprogram the brain’s internal circuits, which, if left unchanged, would maintain addictions.
Putting Into Action
- ACT SMALL, ACT NOW
For example, simply start using smaller plates and utensils, and you may start shedding pounds like you’ve always hoped. Turn one accomplice into a friend, and you may get over the hump in your goal of quitting smoking. Transform your career goal into a game by breaking it into small wins and creating a way to keep score, and you may get traction in no time.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with starting your attempt to move forward by simply adding an idea or two from this book to whatever you’ve been doing before. View the Change Anything model as a way of improving your plan incrementally over time. Just get started. Learn from both your successes and your failures, and then adjust. Eventually you’ll discover the right combination of tactics to help you change for good.
- RECORD IT
Be the Scientist and the Subject. One of your most potent change tools is a recording device—pens, pencils, laptops. Simply recording a plan increases your chance of success by almost a third!
- IMAGINE
What would this world be like if there were a million more people who knew how to apply good science to human change? Lots of important problems would be solved. That’s because when you aim at vital behaviors working in your favor, you change. When you motivate and enable others to enact their vital behaviors, they change.
- CHANGE THE WORLD
while there is yet much to learn about human change, you now have a basic grasp of how to make it happen far more effectively than ever before. You have a systematic way of changing anything. Our hope is that you will now go out and change something.