The Irritation of Motivation

Caution: This post is not particularly witty OR interesting. You've been warned.

Today at work we had a training meeting focusing on Execution. Not of the beheading or electric chair variety, mind you-- the achieving goals sort of execution.  Before I launch into the significance of this, I suppose some back story is in order.  Last July, my company underwent considerable changes which have turned my life into a 16-year-old's summer job nightmare:  A call center.  My promising career in the vacation industry, which endowed me with autonomy, personal & fulfilling relationships with select clients, excellent benefits, job satisfaction and engagement has been stifled into a grinding trudge through incessant eyeball-flaying monotony.  Work has become something I go to only as often as is necessary to remain employed and collect a paycheck --with mounting dread and anxiety as every new shift approaches-- where I perform my duties adequately enough to fly under the radar.  Needless to say, I have not been the most valuable employee of late.  

This is not the way I normally behave, and it has caused me great distress for these many months.  I am a firm believer that every act is a choice and that each choice should be owned and accounted for.  I didn't choose the direction my company has taken, but I have chosen to be a jerk about compliance, and subsequently, must be held entirely accountable for my job-related misery.  These choices have me feeling this:

This is no way to get anywhere.

Which brings me to my meeting today.  I dragged my feet all the way, expecting to take a good morale beating with more unreachable goals and unreasonable expectations.  Far from being battered, I was actually inspired by the content!  I despise this phrase, but I have to admit I felt like it was speaking to me. I left feeling an odd juxtaposition of motivation and irritation. Funny thing about motivation is that, when properly applied, it leads to action. And somehow action and laziness don't get along.  But I feel that laziness is the avoidance or refusal of accountability.  And like I said, I'm not so down with that.  Lazy is easy, but not fulfilling. So as irritating as it is to acknowledge my imminent departure from the easy, now that I've been given the tools I have to go to work. 

The 4 Disciplines of Execution, by Stephen R. Covey and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan provided the blueprint.  

I'm not going to do a whole seminar on achieving goals here, never fear.  I just want to outline the points that spoke to me.  

• 80-some-odd-% of people don't achieve their goals because they don't know what they are.
• Companies that had 1-3 clearly established goals met all of them.  Companies with 4-10 clearly established goals accomplished 1-3 of them.  Companies with 10-20 clearly established goals met... drumroll... 0 of them.
• Accountability is key.  
• If you focus on your "wildly important goals" (Covey's term, not mine) then your subsidiary aspirations will fall into place.
• The "whirlwind" (every day distractions-- otherwise know as LIFE) keeps us from maintaining focus thereby pushing our goals further and further down the to-do list until they disappear from it altogether.
• Procrastination is a death sentence for your goal.
• The equation your goal has to follow is X to Y by When.  You have to know where you are, where you're heading, and exactly when you want to be there.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution are as follows (in as precise of terms as I can recall):

1. Know the goal
2. Know your strategy to achieve the goal, and focus on it like crazy
3. Keep score
4. Establish a cadence of accountability

Work, being a black hole of misery, was an obvious target to shoot my newly acquired insight at.  And I will, I swear.  But although the seminar centered on company goals and success, I was thinking how the principals taught could be vital to my success at life itself.  Relationships, finances, experience.  I am firing off so many goals in too many directions, it's no wonder so many of them fall by the wayside.  And I am expecting Rusty to innately know and be on board with my goals as well, so it's no wonder we get frustrated and feel like we're letting each other down from time to time.  

So I am going to experiment with these new Execution techniques!  Rusty is my reluctant accomplice.  We will very clearly establish 1-3 wildly important goals.  We will construct measures of achievement as well as consult historical evidence to be sure our goals are challenging, but attainable.  We will discuss our strategy and revisit it weekly to keep ourselves on track.  We will keep score so that at any time we will know if we are winning or losing.  And finally, we will have to go to our rooms if we fail. Wait, that's not how grown-up accountability works..?  Ok... well, we will determine what's at stake and know that if we want it, we must succeed.  

Or be EXECUTED.