Finding Joy

I jot down my thoughts to share for the week on Sunday mornings while I’m having my first cup of coffee, thus the name “Sunday Morning Coffee,” and this morning, I’m on my back porch with a steady rain falling. Everything is green or a riot of color, the dog is snoozing alongside me, birds are calling out to each other, and I can hear grandbabies laughing inside. It is well with my soul.

Sundays, though, have historically been a struggle for me. I think it stems from my own schooldays when I dreaded going to school so greatly sometimes that I felt physically ill. This has persisted through adulthood, these “Sunday blues” as they’re called. I haven’t had them so much in the near past, because I’ve learned to be super active on Sundays…cleaning, meeting with friends, cooking with family, getting out in nature…anything other than moping around the house dreading the inevitable. Not that work is a drudgery, it’s just something that I programmed in myself in childhood and then couldn’t shake.

But what happens when work is drudgery? What if the thing you dread on Monday through Friday actually happens? Well my friends, that is no way to work or live. I generally have been fortunate in finding work that feeds my soul and makes me happy. I’d say that my work is a huge part of what defines me as a person. Having said that, though, there are always parts of any job that I a) don’t like as much as others, b) have to force myself to complete, c) despise. It sort of comes with the territory. The trick is to focus on the parts that give you joy and then make sure that those parts are the largest percentage of your work experience.

Here's what jazzes me and keeps me excited about going to work: any direct contact with students/staff as they’re learning, creating content/programs that I know students or staff are going to enjoy, mentoring people who truly want to learn and grow. The things I don’t like as much (creating spreadsheets and putting in data, for instance), I hire people or assign team members to do. If you aren’t the boss, you probably can’t do this, but find the person on your team who does and strike a deal. Oddly enough, there are people who LIKE doing that (I shiver). Let ‘em take it.

One of the best moves I ever made in my leadership journey was hiring a career coach early in my administrative career. Then I hired her to find coaches for each one of my direct reports, so we each had our own coach and then we met as a team with my coach as our lead mentor. We each took a leadership profile survey that identified our top strengths and our top constraints. Then we plotted them out (I didn’t do this part, you already know. I had a nerdy guy on my team who LOVED doing this. I say nerdy with love, because don’t we all have our own brand of nerdy? I LOVED that his brand of nerdy was spreadsheets). He came up with this awesome graphic organizer that consisted of a styrofoam board on which he plotted everyone’s names and the identified strengths and constraints, then had us all put colored pushpins on the graph. That’s a simplified explanation. I’ll just say it was real pretty (now you know why I don’t do this work). On this graph, we suddenly saw, in real time, where our strengths and constraints were as a team. Guess what? It was obvious I was just hiring different versions of me. Which meant that the work that all the me’s don’t like was getting pushed to nerdy guy, and he was overwhelmed. Each of my direct reports did this exercise with their teams. And after that, we hired specifically to fill the gaps. No more me hiring me. Every time I had a position to fill, we met as a team, looked at our updated graph, then hired for the strengths we were lacking as a team.

How did we know about the candidates? We revamped our hiring process. First there was an introductory, conversational phone call, after which the candidate submitted a writing sample, second was an in-person interview that included the candidate doing something that we wanted to see (i.e., if it was a teacher, they had to teach a lesson to us or to a class of students, if it was an Instructional Technology candidate, we asked them on-the-spot to give us an example of how they would take a common teaching tool requiring internet and convert it to a correctional classroom where students didn’t have access to the internet, and etc for all positions), and third, we narrowed candidates to a final three and asked them to take the profile survey so that we could see their strengths and constraints. All things being equal in the final three, we chose the candidate who most closely met the needs of our organization/team.

We were good before this process, but after it, we set the world on fire. No kidding.

If you’re a leader, I’m going to say that for this type of teamwork to really, really, be at it’s best, you have to let go of ego. Example: I was a highly placed executive for an organization and as we plotted out strengths, we all realized that one man on our team was hands down the best at meeting the public. He was well known in our city, he had the ear of politicians, and he’d grown up on the streets so every person in the city who had ever or ever will have a loved one incarcerated with us knew him. The face of our team, the representative and mouth piece for our work, didn’t need to be me. It needed to be him. And so it was. It was, I’m convinced, a game changer. We did more good than we ever would have if I had insisted on being the figure head. It made my soul happy. And his growth??? Oh my. Win, win, win.

I encourage you to find your joy in your work. As for b and c on my list above, some times you have to force yourself to do tasks that feel like drudgery, and on occasion, you do have to buck up and get through parts of a job that you despise. The key, and I can’t emphasize this enough, is to ensure that the parts of your work that bring you joy and feed your soul are the largest part of what you do every day. If you end up in a space where you’re no longer allowed to do that, I encourage you to look elsewhere, because we all know that sometimes you work for an administration that handcuffs you to the worst parts of a job (pun intended). Find your joy where you are or go where it’s accessible.

Ok. To quote Maroon 5, “Sunday morning and rain is falling.” It’s still raining here, I’m out of coffee, and so I’m going to find some weekend joy inside my happy house with my beautiful children and silly grandbabies. I hope you find joy today too.

If I or my team can help with anything you’ve read here, please contact us. we would love to hear from you.

Cheers!