A lot of us carry around similar beliefs, that were often instilled during childhood. We are taught to work hard and at the same time to dream appropriate dreams. By all means, seek to step out ahead, just don’t go too far.
This creates a comfort zone that is incredibly difficult to break out of, because most of us do not even know that we are in it. I would suggest that you are different, because you are reading this. It is this dichotomy that causes us pain and is at the root of many of our failures in life. We aim to make positive moves, but on a subconscious level, we sabotage ourselves. We wouldn’t want our friends and family to think that we were ungrateful or ashamed of where we started, would we?
So, we head into business, we get our first role and we aim to climb the corporate ladder. We develop the same loyalty for a company as we do for the environment in which we were raised and we bring our own diffidence relating to success with us. Success is fine, as long as it is not to showy and self-aggrandising.
So it is that most of us find ourselves working in businesses and jobs where success is not celebrated, but failure is immediately punished. We are part of the organic input into any endeavour that creates the blame culture. We will do anything to prevent the spotlight falling on us, whether that be in either a positive or a negative sense.
Success, it then seems, needs some time to get used to, to accept that it is not such a bad thing. By releasing little gifts of success into our business, we can create a success consciousness that seeps into the human DNA on which our processes pulse. Rather than look for the waste, or the opportunity for optimisation, let’s celebrate the people inputs on the SIPOC map of our world.
If something goes right, let’s celebrate it! Let’s share it. Let’s say ‘yes!’ we did it, now let’s do it again. Naturally, balance is required, we must be careful about falling down the rabbit hole of praising people for doing what they are being paid to do, but we can give thanks for an innovative idea, a great quarterly result, or somebody simply going the extra mile.
A thank you from a manager can derive extra service for the rest of the year.