Do it - Or is it doing you?

I had an interesting revelation today about the way I have lived much of my working life.

I also became aware I have transferred out from a Corporate World where so little of what you do is within your control and where you are at the mindless subservience of the Corporate Beast.

Is mindless the right word? Perhaps not.

The correct term is at the relentless subservience of the Corporate Beast where you become caught up in the ever-increasing pressures and momentum of whatever it is has to be achieved, or seen to be achieved.

So much of my working life, and that of many others, has been spent running, then running harder and harder again in the pursuit of the elusive something and the activities required to get there are largely of it out of our control.

I was having coffee this morning in a favourite City café and became involved in conversation with two articulate and obviously intelligent professionals.

I gathered they each perform a similar role with the same employer, or if not the same employer, at least in the same industry. We didn’t discuss their actual role and only made general references to an employer and on reflection, never by name.

The younger lady mentioned how she needs to find a way to do her work without always feeling like “crap”. The work she does is increasing in intensity, growing in volume and under ever increasing real and perceived compliance and governance scrutiny.

We got to talking about resilience and I put forward my theory that resilience and the training and counselling provided by some employers to help staff become more resilient is in fact creating more pressure than it relieves. Should not the employer be understanding as to why greater resilience is needed and addressing the problem before providing the cure? By way of example, I suggested increasing the pain relief medication to address ever increasing headaches is not addressing the problem, it just increases the resilience to the headache.

The more experience party to the conversation could not hold back any longer. She suggested the only resilience training required consisted of three words and they are “Suck It Up”.

We talked this through a little more and the debate ranged from “that is what the job is, suck it up and just do it” through to “the inevitable outcome when it can be sucked up no longer”. (when the pain relief no longer fixes the headache)

I walked away from the conversation with a clear thought.

One of my conversation partners this morning wanted to “do the work".

The other was happy for the “work to do them”, and to "suck it up" in the meantime.

Take this further in to life itself.

Ask yourself:

Am I living my life, or is life living me?

It is Saturday tomorrow. Do something you love.