Packing For A Transitional Journey

Part I

EXPECTATIONS

Let go of some things and you feel relieved.
“Oh good. That’s over,” you say to yourself when the meeting ends.
“Why,” your co-worker asks? “I thought you were looking forward to it.”
“I was, but then this other matter came up and took all our time.”

Let go of other things and you feel lost and unsure. No wonder we humans want things to stay the same. We’re use to it that way. Something as simple as a shift in our expectations can catapult us out of our comfort zones and leave us feeling edgy and unhappy.

Last week, my husband and I drove back to Connecticut from Cincinnati Ohio. It’s about a 12-hour drive. Roadwork on I-80 eastbound where I-80 meets I-81 snarled up traffic for miles. Even though we had no plans that evening other than getting home safely, our frustrations mounted as we inched along for the better part of an hour. We expected to get home an hour earlier than we did.

Expectations play a strong role in our likes and dislikes, our successes and even our self-confidence. But they purr like a cat when we curl up in our comfort zones. Comfort zones are those habits, places, people, things and activities that feel familiar and cozy to us, like a well-worn slipper. Even unhealthy habits bring comfort to us as we rationalize away reality.

PERCEPTIONS

Many times, a project or task may seem more important to us than it’s intrinsic value, or it’s value to anyone else, because it represents a certain status, or a part of us.

Thanksgiving day, 1967, my husband ate his dinner in the mess hall at Ft Campbell KY and immediately afterward along with other members of the 101^st Airborne Division was airlifted to Viet Nam. I became a “waiting wife” and worked a lot of jigsaw puzzles at night with my mother-in-law. I was good at it. But one night, after searching without success for a particular piece of the puzzle, I divided the table into quadrants with my eyes and meticulously looked through each quadrant for the missing piece.. Then I heard my mother-in-law.

“Is this the piece you’re looking for,” she asked with an impish grin on her face?

She tapped the piece into the puzzle with her long manicured fingernail and smiled. Immediately I felt anger grab a hold of me.

“Why couldn’t she look for something else? Why did she have to look for my piece?” I thought, and returned the smile hiding my feelings.

But then it occurred to me that the point was to work the puzzle together.

I was so caught up in that one little piece of the puzzle that I lost sight of the real purpose, investing in our relationship. I became upset with my mother-in-law, I wanted to blame somebody, and felt betrayed. The more time we invest in a task or project, the more personal and important it can become, until it takes on a life of its own. Making significant changes to it or worse yet, scrapping the project hurts. It feels like a personal rejection and leaves an emotional part of us scrapped right along with it.

HABITS

Enjoyable and habitual work habits initiate a comfort zone. If you had to painstakingly focus to learn as you might have done the first day you arrived and scrupulously think through each task, you would be less effective, confident and efficient. Fortunately, we settle into our work rather quickly with our minds trained to think through the steps of each procedure productively.

Old habits or ways of doing things form a structure that guides us through our workday and through complexities within our job without reinventing the whole process. For example, let’s say that in your job, you must add the responsibility of filling out a new report. Getting use to doing it becomes the biggest hurdle. It may take extra time to fill out the form, but once you get the process down, and the more often you fill it out, the more efficient you become at it. As you persist, you may find more efficient ways to handle the added responsibility and personalize it to your style. Now it’s no longer that new thing, that little blister to deal with, because in time you grew accustomed to it, comfortable with it and now it’s simply part of the job.

ATTITUDE

Recognizing the role habits play in our work lives and how some are useful and others are not prepares us for the first step to transition through change. It helps us identify where we might possibly get stuck like highlighting a road map.

Taking another look at your expectations and shifting them will give you personal power in any change situation you face. Expectations are part of our attitude in any circumstance. Many of us have experienced past situations when we felt we had few if any choices. Even then, in the worse case scenario, we control our attitudes. Empower yourself by considering what you can do, instead of worrying about what you can’t do.