Estremera: Sweating the small stuff and forgetting what's important

DID you find it difficult to adjust your waking hours?” a friend asked as I shifted career in August last year.

“No,” I replied.

“But aren't you a night person?” she persisted.

“I simply changed my waking hours,” I replied.

Really. Being a night person was the call of the job. There is absolutely nothing to do if you report at 8 a.m. in the editorial room of a newspaper office, not unless you are working on some special project.

Reporters still need to gather their reports and write them before you can even edit them and lay them out. While there are the so-called non-perishables, like lifestyle stories and features that we can work on earlier, you will run out of things to do even before the bulk of the work comes in. All others can be done remotely on your mobile. Meaning, you are just expending unnecessary effort for something you can easily do even when you wake up later in the morning.

Be a night person when work requires you to be a night person, and be a day person when your work requires you to be. It's that simple.

“Have you prepared yourself to the idea of you driving?” another friend asked when we discussed about the vehicle I will be getting.

“Do we have to prepare ourselves to such idea?” I asked. It's just driving, you mean people psyche up for this? All that needs to be done is to take up a refresher course just so you build muscle memory, then drive. Psyching myself up for such a routine task is giving this task more than the attention it requires.

It's funny, and sometimes downright frustrating, how many prefer to meet life with their angsts and excuses, and the small stuff, when there is nothing there to even worry about. Of greater importance is in how you welcome the world and the people around you, but no, people would rather focus on whom or what to blame for the state their life is in, they'd rather focus on how they have not yet psyched up enough to face another task.

This is how it is with many, as they worry and blame, looking at every detail of their lives and dwell on what they hate -- the bad habits of people they work with, the negative posts of other people, the sadness and the anger... and then they wonder why their day is not getting any better, why their business remains in the red.

In the book, “Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust” by Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein, it introduces the concept of “personization”, not personalization but personization. It defines this as a process of mutually building relationships with co-workers, colleagues, and the bosses based on seeing that person as a whole.

“Personization has nothing to do with being nice, giving employees good jobs and working conditions, generous benefits or flexible hours. It has everything to do with building relationships that get the job done and that avoid the indifference, manipulation, or worse, lying and concealing that so often arise in work relationships,” an excerpt from the book reads. Ponder on that then beam me up.

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