Being Good to Yourself, Again

Okay. If you show up and you pay attention, you are forty percent of the way there. But it gets harder. This is where you begin to make choices about how you will be a part of things that get done. This is where you choose the quality of your actions. I believe that the standard that we must apply is to choose those actions and only those actions that add value. For me that is what quality means in the context of human life, whether it is public and organizational or private and interpersonal.

That being said, it does not do much to remove the dilemma. Defining value is only a step closer to the answer and not all of the answer. Value is a construct like quality or leadership or love. We tend to know it when we see it, but each definition leaves us wanting more clarity.

We solve this dilemma by operationalizing the construct. We operationalize adding value by measuring the value added. This should be easier in the workplace than in personal relationships. I don’t know anyone that keeps track of the number of smiles that they can stimulate on faces of family members, or the number of thank you’s that they receive on a daily basis. We may not even be aware of such things let alone practicing data capture and analysis. It doesn’t matter that your relationship measures lack scientific rigor. It matters that your goals in relationships are things like creating smiles and thank you’s and the occasional, “I needed that.”

At work it is often not about what we choose to do but about what we choose not to do. When Warren Bennis was researching one of his books on leadership he was asking people what leaders did that encouraged followership. One of his interview subjects said that his leader “didn’t waste his time.” Some managers think that they add value because they keep people busy. Trust me; people know the difference between real work and busy work. Real work adds value and busy work does not. Patrick Lencioni, in his book, “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job” said that people must have a clear idea that their work matters, and that it has relevance for others. He said that they must be able to measure their contributions in a way that does not depend upon the subjective views of superiors.

So, if you are a manager avoid busy work like the plague, and if you are an individual contributor resist doing things that don’t matter to customers (the final arbiters of the worth of our work). You may then find yourself choosing behavior that adds value or at least questioning what you are doing. You may have to upgrade the ways in which you pay attention in order to define value, but that’s okay. You can’t really add value without showing up and paying attention anyway.

All right, I will concede that none of this is fish in a barrel easy. Jesse Ventura is quoted as saying something like the following:

When it comes to bringing values to life – to doing the
good, right, and appropriate thing…we're always working
at it, we're never totally there, and the challenge starts
all over again with each new tomorrow.

There is no way to argue with that. If it were easy we would all be doing it all the time. Simple does not equal easy. I think that one of the primary reasons why the overarching goal of physical medicine is to “do no harm” is because medicine has so much potential for harm running along with its huge potential for healing. We all need a sort of Hippocrates in our lives to give us some rules to follow. I have shared three that my friend offered to me with his advice to “be good to yourself.” There are two more to come. Stay tuned.