In the past few posts I've covered quite a few potential sources of dissatisfaction at work. You might have found yourself in a job which sits poorly with your personal identity, or you may have found yourself in a workplace which lacks sufficient trust. This post is focused on some methods with a good psychological backing to help you change yourself so you can get closer to the things you want. I'm focusing on self-change here as it's perhaps the most fundamental thing you can do to address an unhappy situation, and has the most profound effects. There's a lot of resonance in this topic for me personally, and this blog is a part of my own change process. First, I'm going to discuss approaches that make change more likely, then I'll move on to techniques for determining what kind of positive change you really want to make.
Making change more likely
Much like actively designing a computer system is far better than letting circumstance design it for you, playing an active role in your own development can be significantly better than waiting for the right experiences to come along. Most IT people find that learning new technology is a major part of what attracts them to the job in the first place. Getting new certifications is a pretty standard thing, and even if you don't tend to go through the formal exam process, you're almost certain to be learning new things much of the time. This is a great way to frame personal development too, which can be at least as valuable, both in terms of career success and happiness.
The most useful concept in fostering self-change is, well, usefulness. By this, I mean actions and practices which move you closer to your long-term aims, or which reduce things which you slow you down. Useful things might be as simple as getting outside for a walk at lunchtime, thus reducing stress and giving you a chance to reframe any tricky problems, or making sure you celebrate the small victories which happen throughout the week. It might also be useful to avoid certain behaviours, such as banging your head against a coding problem which you're struggling to solve, or getting into situations which you know regularly make you angry.
Systematically increasing the chances of useful things happening is one of the key parts of change. The most effective way to do this isn't to try and tough it out, using will power to make thinks happen. Recent research suggests will power is easily depleted and limited, with some researchers questioning whether it exists at all. A better approach, but still not the whole picture, is to identify goals which you want to work towards. These are good for informing your direction of travel, but they're not typically enough to really change behaviour consistently. They're too likely to fall victim to hyperbolic discounting, the effect by which we'll gladly put aside massive rewards in the future for tiny but immediate wins.
In the long run, the way to successfully change anything about yourself is to set up the situation so doing the right thing is the easiest choice. You can think of this like doing the UI design on your own life. By making the useful things the default, straightforward choice, you're more likely to do them. With a bit of practice they soon become habit, and then stick. The other reason to focus on systemic, habit-creating features of change is because actual change requires action. It isn't enough to simply want to do something, or want to stop doing something. You have to execute if you actually want to change. This doesn't mean that every single action is the final arbiter of success, but that over time it's the small actions and decisions which ultimately result in large, noticeable changes. You don't have to win every time, but successful change comes from creating a situation where you win more times than you lose. This focus on doing, rather than on being, can be a really good way to get the momentum necessary to achieve what you want.
Now we've covered some of the ways you might make change we need to think about the reasons to do so. Being led by negatives - the desire to move away from something - can end up in getting stuck, or can lead to finding yourself in a situation where nothing is terribly bad, but nothing is really good either. The way to address this is to be led by exciting, significant goals which you can work towards. Once you have a positive objective to aim for, it's much easier to change, and it's also much easier to stick with the difficult aspects of change when you know there will be a payoff in the end.
Choosing goals
For many people, myself included, the most difficult part of all of this is working out what the big goals really are. It's all to easy to drift through life thinking a day a time, and rarely thinking forward much more than to the next holiday or exciting event. Almost every life planning, coaching and self-improvement approach contains an exercise to address this. They working on a variety of timescales, but they all amount to a similar thing. List the things you'd really like to do, and then organise your life so they move in that direction. It's important to note that direction, and the journey towards a goal, is often more important than the actual goal, exciting though it may be. It's all to easy to be disappointed with a great outcome simply because it wasn't the one you were originally aiming for. You need to have a goal in order to enable an interesting journey, rather than to end up exactly where you were expecting.
Whether you're choosing a one year, three year, ten year, or lifetime ("what do I want to be remembered for?") timescale, the important thing is to focus on what really excites you and creates most value for other people. It's important to stick with things you really want to do, as you'll find motivation runs out quickly if you pursue something other people think is a good idea for you, but helping others is vital too. That's not to say that you necessarily have to make a lot of money, more that helping people by doing what you're best at is one of the major pillars of a happy life. If you happen to have personal goals that don't directly deliver this, for example the desire to travel the world, then think about how you can help others as along the way. Going back to the example, you could write, photograph, or volunteer your way around the places you visit when travelling.
Self-knowledge
Making these decisions require two things; knowing what you want, and knowing your strengths. These two factors are interrelated, as you're likely to enjoy things you're good at, but you're also best to go for goals that coincide with your strengths. Figuring out what you want is a process with few shortcuts, but it can be great fun. The experimental approach is really useful here, and that means your best interests are met by going out and trying new things. If you're following the advice above and making space for these things happen, you could commit some time and money to trying something new, perhaps one a month, for the next year, and see where that takes you. There's no need to plan everything out now, just give yourself permission and do the next thing.
Dealing with resistance
On one level, this can be a very exciting prospect. You get to try all sorts of new experiences and hopefully meet some really interesting people along the way. However, you might have read the words above and felt yourself coming up with a long list of objections, or you might find that you get carried away with excitement in planning some things to do, but don't actually follow through. These are both examples of resistance, your mind's mechanism intent on keeping things as they are. I often find it to be strongest around the things we want the most, perhaps because there's most at stake, and it can therefore be a major barrier in getting to where we'd like to be.
As with a lot of these deep-seated, highly-automated processes, resistance to change often takes place below full consciousness. If you find yourself making excuses not to do something exciting, such as "I probably won't be good at it", or "it won't be worth my while trying", then there's a good chance that's resistance talking. Spotting it, however, can be tricky. The best way I've found is to do something which gives me some mental space to step back from immediate concerns; getting out in the countryside, playing some music, or meditating. Do whatever works for you. If you don't have at least a couple of things which you can rely on to give you some peace and space, then you may have an area in which some experimental living is called for.
If you let the voice of resistance make the decision for you, you're very unlikely to change. Overcoming it is therefore a very useful habit to adopt. Once you recognise resistance, you can either choose to ignore it and power through - whilst bearing in mind that's not a sustainable long-term strategy - or you can investigate its root cause and look at ways to address that. Internal resistance has such a range of possible origins it's not possible to go through all of them here, but I find that, as with solving a tricky programming problem, it's not so much about finding the answer as it is about asking the right question in the first place.
That said, one form of resistance that's always worth looking out for is permission-seeking. We're trained from an early age to ask for permission for the things we want, and that can be an extremely hard habit to break, particularly when it's reinforced by a lot of workplaces. This can manifest as a kind of impostor-syndrome, in that you feel you're not expert enough to do something, or can manifest in simply not feeling like you're not worthy of the rewards you might get. If you accept you're good enough to start trying, and that which comes to you as a result of your efforts is deserved, a lot of resistance simply dissolves.
If you do need to get over resistance which you can't pin down, or which you can't fully address, then you can still change things. To build momentum and overcome what resistance is there, the important thing is to take action. Small steps towards the goal are an infinity better than no steps at all. Try removing all distractions and focusing on the one task, or experiment with a new approach to the problem. Don't be too focused on an exact outcome, as you're starting a process, not delivering the finished article before you've even begun. When you do start getting change in the direction you want, celebrate it, and reflect upon what worked. By taking that away and improving further, you can build change upon change.
Working through discomfort
Both exploring and overcoming resistance can be very uncomfortable processes. You might need to ask some awkward questions of yourself, or put yourself in new and potentially challenging situations. Learning to live with a degree of discomfort, for at least some of the time, is another habit that's well worth acquiring. You can think of it as feedback that you're making progress, or think of it as a cost that you need to pay in order to get the rewards you want. My personal experience is that as I've been trying to change, the amount of discomfort I can tolerate has gone up, and the extent that I build it in as a factor in decision-making has gone down. That's not to say it's gone forever, and that there isn't a small, nagging part of me that feels like I'm making a fool of myself writing these blog posts, but it's now a quieter part and it's a lot easier to ignore.
Finding your strengths
Once you've figured out what you really want and got over any barriers to do that, the next thing is to figure out your strengths. This is important for a number of reasons, one of the prime ones being that we become successful by focusing upon and using our strengths, not trying really hard to compensate for the weaker areas we all have. Personally, I didn't have a very clear idea of what my strengths were. It's not something the world tends to tell you spontaneously. Furthermore, it's very easy to assume that everyone else shares your strengths too, that the things you find easy are inherently easy for all, and therefore you're no better at them than anyone else. By finding out otherwise, not only are you able to concentrate on your best, but you can then give others space to do what they're good at and you're not.
There are myriad different strategies for finding your strengths, some better than others. Before I start on some of my favourites, a warning. Don't just focus on one of these; use as many as you can and triangulate your answer precisely. Secondly, beware of answers that you want to hear. Understanding your strengths also implies understanding your weaknesses, and that can be a really difficult message to take. If something is entirely uncritical, then it's worth digging a little deeper to find out why.
So, warning out of the way, on to the first way to find your strengths; attend to the itch. Throughout life there will be small things that grate on you far more than they do other people. They might be linguistic, such as poor grammar or misused words. They could be visual, such as poor colour choice or awkward graphic design. Perhaps you find at work that you're frustrated because you spot opportunities which others miss, suggesting strategic skills. This itch is a really good indicator of something you're sensitive to because you're good at it. If you take note over the course of the next week of things like this that pop out at you, but not to others, you can start to get an idea.
The next way to understand your strengths is to ask others for feedback. This can be a challenging process, and might require living with significant discomfort. However, getting, and indeed giving, good feedback is a key aspect of personal and professional growth. Find someone whose opinion you trust, with whom you have a positive relationship, and start by asking specific, limited questions about an individual piece of work. You can build up to bigger, more fundamental questions over time, but asking someone to make general judgements about you as a whole is going to make them feel very awkward and is unlikely to give you the information you need. Whatever you ask, though, make sure you attend in detail to what's being said and don't try to explain the negatives away. The blog and podcast associated with the book Radical Candor has some really excellent advice on feedback, amongst other things.
The last of my preferred methods for finding strengths is to use standardised tests to compare yourself to others. Obviously this includes academic tests, but these can be quite narrow and tend to tell you more about what you've practised than what you might be good at in the future. There are many more preference and personality typing tests out there, perhaps the most famous of which is the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI). This assesses you on a variety of dimensions, arriving at a four-character reference to one of sixteen different personality types. It's an interesting tool to understand preferences in particular, and there's plenty of free information available on the web to do find out your type and to explore what that might mean, including an busy subreddit. I've done a couple of different tests and they usually arrive at ENTP. I found this information fairly useful, particularly with respect to how I go about change and how I feel about conversation with others.
Another tool which I tried more recently is Gallup's Strengthsfinder 2.0. Both the name and the delivery mechanism (you have you buy the book to take an online test) have aged poorly, but the information itself is very useful. It gives you a very work-orientated view of your particular strengths, giving a personal top five and some helpful advice and follow-up actions to go with them. According to this, my five strengths are ideation, strategic, learner, individualisation and futuristic. The names aren't much more meaningful here than the Myers-Briggs code, but I certainly found the results interesting. There's definitely some overlap between the two results as well, which is reassuring as to their accuracy.
Speaking from a scientific standpoint, whilst these tests are based upon a huge amount of data, the findings are not as stable as was thought. People can change over time, particularly when they're living in a difference social context, which emphasises different aspects of themselves. It's also the case that there are some major cultural assumptions implicit in the categories and questions used. This suggests that they're not really identifying fundamental aspects of the self in the way that was originally thought. That's not to say that such tests are worthless, I really urge you to give some a try. Let me know how you get on, or if you have any favourites I've missed in the comments. Again, the key thing is to use as many sources as possible to build a comprehensive picture of your personal skills, and develop the habit of refining that over time.
Bringing it together
Hopefully you now have a much better idea of the approaches you can use to find your strengths, from feedback, standardised tests, and reflection. You can use this information to focus on some exciting, fulfilling goals which you are personally positioned to excel at. You have a range of different approaches to deal with the barriers to positive change which you can make use of, from overcoming resistance to developing positive habits. Each of these topics is a major area of research of its own and could fill an entire blog-post, but hopefully this overview is enough for you to take the next step, which after all, is the only way to move forward. Focus on that, over and over, and you'll amaze yourself at how much things can improve, and how quickly.
Making change more likely
Much like actively designing a computer system is far better than letting circumstance design it for you, playing an active role in your own development can be significantly better than waiting for the right experiences to come along. Most IT people find that learning new technology is a major part of what attracts them to the job in the first place. Getting new certifications is a pretty standard thing, and even if you don't tend to go through the formal exam process, you're almost certain to be learning new things much of the time. This is a great way to frame personal development too, which can be at least as valuable, both in terms of career success and happiness.
The most useful concept in fostering self-change is, well, usefulness. By this, I mean actions and practices which move you closer to your long-term aims, or which reduce things which you slow you down. Useful things might be as simple as getting outside for a walk at lunchtime, thus reducing stress and giving you a chance to reframe any tricky problems, or making sure you celebrate the small victories which happen throughout the week. It might also be useful to avoid certain behaviours, such as banging your head against a coding problem which you're struggling to solve, or getting into situations which you know regularly make you angry.
Systematically increasing the chances of useful things happening is one of the key parts of change. The most effective way to do this isn't to try and tough it out, using will power to make thinks happen. Recent research suggests will power is easily depleted and limited, with some researchers questioning whether it exists at all. A better approach, but still not the whole picture, is to identify goals which you want to work towards. These are good for informing your direction of travel, but they're not typically enough to really change behaviour consistently. They're too likely to fall victim to hyperbolic discounting, the effect by which we'll gladly put aside massive rewards in the future for tiny but immediate wins.
In the long run, the way to successfully change anything about yourself is to set up the situation so doing the right thing is the easiest choice. You can think of this like doing the UI design on your own life. By making the useful things the default, straightforward choice, you're more likely to do them. With a bit of practice they soon become habit, and then stick. The other reason to focus on systemic, habit-creating features of change is because actual change requires action. It isn't enough to simply want to do something, or want to stop doing something. You have to execute if you actually want to change. This doesn't mean that every single action is the final arbiter of success, but that over time it's the small actions and decisions which ultimately result in large, noticeable changes. You don't have to win every time, but successful change comes from creating a situation where you win more times than you lose. This focus on doing, rather than on being, can be a really good way to get the momentum necessary to achieve what you want.
Now we've covered some of the ways you might make change we need to think about the reasons to do so. Being led by negatives - the desire to move away from something - can end up in getting stuck, or can lead to finding yourself in a situation where nothing is terribly bad, but nothing is really good either. The way to address this is to be led by exciting, significant goals which you can work towards. Once you have a positive objective to aim for, it's much easier to change, and it's also much easier to stick with the difficult aspects of change when you know there will be a payoff in the end.
Choosing goals
For many people, myself included, the most difficult part of all of this is working out what the big goals really are. It's all to easy to drift through life thinking a day a time, and rarely thinking forward much more than to the next holiday or exciting event. Almost every life planning, coaching and self-improvement approach contains an exercise to address this. They working on a variety of timescales, but they all amount to a similar thing. List the things you'd really like to do, and then organise your life so they move in that direction. It's important to note that direction, and the journey towards a goal, is often more important than the actual goal, exciting though it may be. It's all to easy to be disappointed with a great outcome simply because it wasn't the one you were originally aiming for. You need to have a goal in order to enable an interesting journey, rather than to end up exactly where you were expecting.
Whether you're choosing a one year, three year, ten year, or lifetime ("what do I want to be remembered for?") timescale, the important thing is to focus on what really excites you and creates most value for other people. It's important to stick with things you really want to do, as you'll find motivation runs out quickly if you pursue something other people think is a good idea for you, but helping others is vital too. That's not to say that you necessarily have to make a lot of money, more that helping people by doing what you're best at is one of the major pillars of a happy life. If you happen to have personal goals that don't directly deliver this, for example the desire to travel the world, then think about how you can help others as along the way. Going back to the example, you could write, photograph, or volunteer your way around the places you visit when travelling.
Self-knowledge
Making these decisions require two things; knowing what you want, and knowing your strengths. These two factors are interrelated, as you're likely to enjoy things you're good at, but you're also best to go for goals that coincide with your strengths. Figuring out what you want is a process with few shortcuts, but it can be great fun. The experimental approach is really useful here, and that means your best interests are met by going out and trying new things. If you're following the advice above and making space for these things happen, you could commit some time and money to trying something new, perhaps one a month, for the next year, and see where that takes you. There's no need to plan everything out now, just give yourself permission and do the next thing.
Dealing with resistance
On one level, this can be a very exciting prospect. You get to try all sorts of new experiences and hopefully meet some really interesting people along the way. However, you might have read the words above and felt yourself coming up with a long list of objections, or you might find that you get carried away with excitement in planning some things to do, but don't actually follow through. These are both examples of resistance, your mind's mechanism intent on keeping things as they are. I often find it to be strongest around the things we want the most, perhaps because there's most at stake, and it can therefore be a major barrier in getting to where we'd like to be.
As with a lot of these deep-seated, highly-automated processes, resistance to change often takes place below full consciousness. If you find yourself making excuses not to do something exciting, such as "I probably won't be good at it", or "it won't be worth my while trying", then there's a good chance that's resistance talking. Spotting it, however, can be tricky. The best way I've found is to do something which gives me some mental space to step back from immediate concerns; getting out in the countryside, playing some music, or meditating. Do whatever works for you. If you don't have at least a couple of things which you can rely on to give you some peace and space, then you may have an area in which some experimental living is called for.
If you let the voice of resistance make the decision for you, you're very unlikely to change. Overcoming it is therefore a very useful habit to adopt. Once you recognise resistance, you can either choose to ignore it and power through - whilst bearing in mind that's not a sustainable long-term strategy - or you can investigate its root cause and look at ways to address that. Internal resistance has such a range of possible origins it's not possible to go through all of them here, but I find that, as with solving a tricky programming problem, it's not so much about finding the answer as it is about asking the right question in the first place.
That said, one form of resistance that's always worth looking out for is permission-seeking. We're trained from an early age to ask for permission for the things we want, and that can be an extremely hard habit to break, particularly when it's reinforced by a lot of workplaces. This can manifest as a kind of impostor-syndrome, in that you feel you're not expert enough to do something, or can manifest in simply not feeling like you're not worthy of the rewards you might get. If you accept you're good enough to start trying, and that which comes to you as a result of your efforts is deserved, a lot of resistance simply dissolves.
If you do need to get over resistance which you can't pin down, or which you can't fully address, then you can still change things. To build momentum and overcome what resistance is there, the important thing is to take action. Small steps towards the goal are an infinity better than no steps at all. Try removing all distractions and focusing on the one task, or experiment with a new approach to the problem. Don't be too focused on an exact outcome, as you're starting a process, not delivering the finished article before you've even begun. When you do start getting change in the direction you want, celebrate it, and reflect upon what worked. By taking that away and improving further, you can build change upon change.
Working through discomfort
Both exploring and overcoming resistance can be very uncomfortable processes. You might need to ask some awkward questions of yourself, or put yourself in new and potentially challenging situations. Learning to live with a degree of discomfort, for at least some of the time, is another habit that's well worth acquiring. You can think of it as feedback that you're making progress, or think of it as a cost that you need to pay in order to get the rewards you want. My personal experience is that as I've been trying to change, the amount of discomfort I can tolerate has gone up, and the extent that I build it in as a factor in decision-making has gone down. That's not to say it's gone forever, and that there isn't a small, nagging part of me that feels like I'm making a fool of myself writing these blog posts, but it's now a quieter part and it's a lot easier to ignore.
Finding your strengths
Once you've figured out what you really want and got over any barriers to do that, the next thing is to figure out your strengths. This is important for a number of reasons, one of the prime ones being that we become successful by focusing upon and using our strengths, not trying really hard to compensate for the weaker areas we all have. Personally, I didn't have a very clear idea of what my strengths were. It's not something the world tends to tell you spontaneously. Furthermore, it's very easy to assume that everyone else shares your strengths too, that the things you find easy are inherently easy for all, and therefore you're no better at them than anyone else. By finding out otherwise, not only are you able to concentrate on your best, but you can then give others space to do what they're good at and you're not.
There are myriad different strategies for finding your strengths, some better than others. Before I start on some of my favourites, a warning. Don't just focus on one of these; use as many as you can and triangulate your answer precisely. Secondly, beware of answers that you want to hear. Understanding your strengths also implies understanding your weaknesses, and that can be a really difficult message to take. If something is entirely uncritical, then it's worth digging a little deeper to find out why.
So, warning out of the way, on to the first way to find your strengths; attend to the itch. Throughout life there will be small things that grate on you far more than they do other people. They might be linguistic, such as poor grammar or misused words. They could be visual, such as poor colour choice or awkward graphic design. Perhaps you find at work that you're frustrated because you spot opportunities which others miss, suggesting strategic skills. This itch is a really good indicator of something you're sensitive to because you're good at it. If you take note over the course of the next week of things like this that pop out at you, but not to others, you can start to get an idea.
The next way to understand your strengths is to ask others for feedback. This can be a challenging process, and might require living with significant discomfort. However, getting, and indeed giving, good feedback is a key aspect of personal and professional growth. Find someone whose opinion you trust, with whom you have a positive relationship, and start by asking specific, limited questions about an individual piece of work. You can build up to bigger, more fundamental questions over time, but asking someone to make general judgements about you as a whole is going to make them feel very awkward and is unlikely to give you the information you need. Whatever you ask, though, make sure you attend in detail to what's being said and don't try to explain the negatives away. The blog and podcast associated with the book Radical Candor has some really excellent advice on feedback, amongst other things.
The last of my preferred methods for finding strengths is to use standardised tests to compare yourself to others. Obviously this includes academic tests, but these can be quite narrow and tend to tell you more about what you've practised than what you might be good at in the future. There are many more preference and personality typing tests out there, perhaps the most famous of which is the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI). This assesses you on a variety of dimensions, arriving at a four-character reference to one of sixteen different personality types. It's an interesting tool to understand preferences in particular, and there's plenty of free information available on the web to do find out your type and to explore what that might mean, including an busy subreddit. I've done a couple of different tests and they usually arrive at ENTP. I found this information fairly useful, particularly with respect to how I go about change and how I feel about conversation with others.
Another tool which I tried more recently is Gallup's Strengthsfinder 2.0. Both the name and the delivery mechanism (you have you buy the book to take an online test) have aged poorly, but the information itself is very useful. It gives you a very work-orientated view of your particular strengths, giving a personal top five and some helpful advice and follow-up actions to go with them. According to this, my five strengths are ideation, strategic, learner, individualisation and futuristic. The names aren't much more meaningful here than the Myers-Briggs code, but I certainly found the results interesting. There's definitely some overlap between the two results as well, which is reassuring as to their accuracy.
Speaking from a scientific standpoint, whilst these tests are based upon a huge amount of data, the findings are not as stable as was thought. People can change over time, particularly when they're living in a difference social context, which emphasises different aspects of themselves. It's also the case that there are some major cultural assumptions implicit in the categories and questions used. This suggests that they're not really identifying fundamental aspects of the self in the way that was originally thought. That's not to say that such tests are worthless, I really urge you to give some a try. Let me know how you get on, or if you have any favourites I've missed in the comments. Again, the key thing is to use as many sources as possible to build a comprehensive picture of your personal skills, and develop the habit of refining that over time.
Bringing it together
Hopefully you now have a much better idea of the approaches you can use to find your strengths, from feedback, standardised tests, and reflection. You can use this information to focus on some exciting, fulfilling goals which you are personally positioned to excel at. You have a range of different approaches to deal with the barriers to positive change which you can make use of, from overcoming resistance to developing positive habits. Each of these topics is a major area of research of its own and could fill an entire blog-post, but hopefully this overview is enough for you to take the next step, which after all, is the only way to move forward. Focus on that, over and over, and you'll amaze yourself at how much things can improve, and how quickly.
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