Category: Work Life

After thirty years in business coaching, there are a few things I know to be true: 1) different people have different innate skills and abilities, 2) most people are currently performing jobs that are not supported by their natural skills and abilities, and 3) when people connect with jobs that are supported by their natural skills and abilities, they shine.

All of which I’ve always found reflected in the following quote from Confucius: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

However, I recently ran across a couple of blog posts that gave me pause to reflect on this quote, its meaning and how others sometimes interpret it differently than I do. You can peruse these posts online: “The Overjustification Effect” by David McRaney at and “Bad Career Advice: Do What You Love and You’ll Never Work a Day” by Chrissy Scivicque.

Mr. McRaney states there’s a misconception that “there is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love” and the truth is actually “getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.”   The key difference is the emphasis placed on reward – in my view (much like Confucius) the reward is never the primary motivation, it’s icing on the cake.

According to Ms. Scivicque: “this absurd axiom suggests that you can simply take what you already love, turn it into something for which you get paid, and it won’t ever feel like anything other than that thing you love.” Perhaps if I interpreted the quote the way she does, I would agree with her conclusions. But my view of the quote goes more like this:

“If your job requires you to perform activities that make use of skills and abilities that are innately yours, you will find that your work ceases to be drudgery and becomes something significant, meaningful and enjoyable.”

Here’s the first point of distinction between Ms. Scivicque’s interpretation and mine: choosing a job you love does not necessarily mean choosing a job for which you have a passion. You can love the fact that your nonprofit helps kids connect with mentors, but still hate picking up the phone. You can love technology, but hate dealing with people who don’t know how to make their router work. In other words, you can love what your business does, but not what you do in your business.

Here’s another important difference between my interpretation of the quote and Ms. Scivicque’s: doing a job you love does not mean you will not have to expend effort, or that there will not be struggles and challenges along the way. I do not believe that working at a job you love will always be fun or easy – only that jobs that reflect who we are in what they call on us to actually do provide satisfaction in a way that jobs we’re only doing for the money never will.

The meaning of the quote turns on the word ‘work’ and how different people perceive the word. So many of us define the word from a completely economic point of view, rather than what we do to develop our innate gifts and talents. From this economic viewpoint, work consists of activities that we don’t even like, much less love, and that we would prefer to avoid.

I view work as part of being human. It is something we do because we are alive, and part of the human imperative is to do as well as to be. Work, by its very nature, requires effort – skills must be developed, talents discovered, old abilities refreshed and new capacities revealed.

But effort and drudgery are not the same thing.

Work, as Fredrick Buechner’s defined it, is “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Work is not something to be avoided or transformed; rather, it is something to embrace. Why? Because it illuminates our excellence, both to ourselves and others.

Does my interpretation of Confucius’ quote differ from that of Ms. Scivicque and Mr. McRaney? Absolutely! And perhaps from yours as well. That’s okay with me – the innate differences between people are what my work is all about.

About the Author:

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and systems that WORK. She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com.

I’m sitting in my local café, you know, my second office.  It’s the place I come when I need some space and inspiration.  Strangely enough the bustle, movement and background music gives me the peace and quiet I need to write.

The space is right, the deadline is here (and I love deadlines, they never fail to get me into action) and the music is great!

I’m in such a place of serene calm that each idea that surfaces just makes me smile and the page remains blank.

Every now and then email arrives in that 2 second flash at the bottom of my screen; enough to take notice and see the first few words, not enough to know the full content.  The email tells me that my website is being erratic, my assistant is trying to resolve a problem, a client has a query, and my students are submitting material for review. And I’m distracted enough not to write, but remain in the calm space of the blank page.

And then the story pieces start to show up…

We met after many months.  I adore his energy, his humor.  He is smart, original and his work is so important…and he’s broke.  He’s SO good at what he does, and no one knows him.  He’s convinced that his story is fine…yet he’s still struggling and telling himself more self-sabotaging stories.

She is flying high on the salary, the car, the great bonuses and the drugs.  No, she doesn’t call them drugs, it’s just to get a handle on the migraines and the pressure.  She’s loving life so hard, it’s killing her and every time she sees a movie, she cries.  A little girl still waiting for daddy to approve of her…

He’s 10 years old and tells me that when he’s really tired he just sits on the ground with his legs crossed and imagines the light entering each part of his body.  Starting from his feet and going right up to his head.  It lights him up and relaxes him, when he opens his eyes he feels much better.  I said, you’re amazing, you’ve taught yourself what takes most people years, to meditate.  And he shrugs and says, must have learnt it in my past life…

She exercises regularly, eats healthily and sleeps like a log.  She’s super-organized, remembers everything and never makes mistakes. She’s always on time, reminds everyone else about their commitments and bakes her own bread.  She craves cigarettes and smokes whenever no one is looking.

The stories are all around us.  Some fact, some told, some ignored and some assumed.

They are the people we know, the stories they tell us and the stories they tell themselves.

They are the stories that create our reality, from them and for us.

Did you find you?  Did you find someone you know?

We always have a choice, the choice to tell stories that keep us stuck, stories that hurt us, or the empowering stories, stories that inspire us.

What you’re choice?  What’s your story?

When the alarm clock radio has awakened me for the past few weeks, the sun was getting up and it was light. I like that.

This morning, it went off and the sun was still asleep and it was dark. I don’t like that.

Welcome to the first workday of Daylight Savings Time.

Sure, I’ll enjoy an extra hour of sunlight this evening. But that didn’t help any this morning.

Somebody moved my time.

Seems like somebody is always moving something, aren’t they? Especially in business…

Since everything is changing so rapidly, how do you keep up?

Here are 3 tips to help you positively spring forward at work:

Remind yourself: Change happens.

Of course this isn’t my first change to Daylight Savings Time. They move my time every year. In fact, they recently changed when they move my time. Kind of a double change…

Whether you’ve been in business a couple of years or a couple of decades, your business has experienced change. Some of the change was cyclical and you anticipated it. Other change was unpredictable, perhaps blind-sided you. You worked in the darkness.

Change happens.

Sure, our brains crave the familiar. Our minds seek out patterns we recognize. We want to do business in predictable, anticipated ways that create the results we want every time.

If such a time did exist, it’s gone forever.

Remind yourself daily that change happens…to everyone, everywhere.

Remember a previous change experience you survived

Since this isn’t my first change to Daylight Savings Time, I can remember a previous time that I survived. I can recall working in my rose garden in that extra hour of daylight. Or, trail riding our horses with my wife, enjoying a beautiful, hour-delayed sunset.

You can remember a previous time at work when change intruded on your familiar-driven business, plunging you into temporary darkness. Your vendor changed price structuring. The bank changed credit terms. Your key employee left you to change jobs. You preferred the light, i.e., your previous way of doing your work.

However, you discovered a way to survive the change. You adapted successfully. In fact, you found a way to make the new become familiar—through repetition, the same way you learned your multiplication tables in third grade. You just kept going until you did it.

Remember that time of change. Sit down and soak in the success of that experience. You survived it, perhaps now thrive because of it. And you will this one as well.

Relax and focus on your positive strengths

Yes, somebody moved my time, but there remain some constants in the change. I still have a vast reserve of positive strengths to call on in dealing with the changing time. I can relax and call on my time-adapting skills and embrace the change.

Your Work Positive strengths are still yours. What you do well may take on various expressions in a changing environment, but you have strengths that are still viable and necessary to your business.

Relax into your strengths. Now that you are reminded of the endemic nature of change, and remember a previous, successful experience with it, release the anxiety that often accompanies change and relax enough to do what you do well in your business.

The time may change, but the clock continues to work.

And so will you.

Positively spring forward as you Work Positive today.

Have you ever had the experience of being so deeply immersed in a project that you lost track of time? Research shows that those are the times when we’re happiest- when we’re engaging our natural skills and abilities.

As a business coach with over thirty years of experience, I’ve seen it in action, over and over again: people succeed when they put themselves in a position to truly use their natural skills and abilities. Happiness leads to success.

When I talk about this—it seems clear that everyone in the audience knows exactly what I’m talking about, because the result is almost universally positive.

People like the idea of developing their natural skills and talents, and they are familiar (usually from early childhood) with the meaning and satisfaction that comes from engaging in activities that are supported by their innate Perceptual Style.

While this “sounds good” to almost everyone, most people don’t believe that it’s possible to succeed in business by focusing on their natural skills and abilities.

Talking to people after a presentation, I have heard many variations on the same theme: “Sounds great, but I have a business to run and don’t have time to be distracted,” or “Sounds like a lot of hard work,” or “You can’t just focus on the positive.”

Recently, though, I discovered an answer to why people can be so negative about being positive! Research in positive psychology shows that many people have a formula for happiness set up in their heads that goes like this: “If I work harder, I will be more successful. If I am more successful, then I will be happy.”

Telling someone who has this formula in his head to work on those skills and talents that are “easy” rather than “hard” is the same as telling him to give up on success and happiness and settle for what they have.

Research, however, has shown that this formula doesn’t work. Hard work may lead to some success, but success doesn’t lead to happiness. The truth is 180 degrees different: Happiness leads to real success. When people are happy and focused on the positive aspects of themselves and the world, their brains perform 31 percent better than if they are negative, neutral, or stressed. They are more intelligent, more creative, and have more energy. In fact, when people are happy, their performance improves on every single measure of business outcome.

According to Shawn Achor, founder and CEO of Good Think, Inc., “If we study what is merely average, we will remain average.” What we focus on and study creates our reality. If you focus on discovering and developing your weaknesses, your will have a never-ending list of acquired skills that you must work hard to develop. While you may become proficient in those skills over time, you will also be physically, emotionally, and psychologically stressed. And we now know how much less efficient our brains are when we are stressed!

If you want to be truly successful, first you must be happy. To be happy, you must focus on what you genuinely enjoy doing, and focus on developing what you already do well. Almost anyone who has mastered any discipline will attest to the truth of this.

So, to those who question the investment in their own talents and abilities, I say: If you want to be happy and successful, you must focus on your natural gifts and talents. It’s not a lot of hard work, it’s a lot of easy work. What you are doing now is hard work!

About the Author: 

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and systems that WORK. She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com.