Great Days at Work by Suzanne Hazelton

Author:Suzanne Hazelton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page

The major part of the above has been to bring awareness to the past negative perspective in business, because it is a major time and energy waster for you. In some business settings, the past positive may be more difficult to accomplish – this can be about taking time to celebrate and remembering success. You may need to employ a little creativity, to find ways in your environment to celebrate success, and perhaps even sneak in the occasional past positive memory.

However, a word of caution: ‘Do you remember the good old times before the last department reorganization?’… this might initially sound like past positive, but contains elements of past negative in that the negative is the implicit or even explicit criticism that the department was better before the reorganization.

One useful tool is De Bono’s six thinking hats (De Bono, 2000). The colour of each hat symbolizes a different perspective to take. When everyone is aware of the perspective of each hat, people can be directed to metaphorically wear different hats at different stages of the meeting. The benefit of an approach such as this is that people know that different perspectives will get covered, and the meeting can progress with group members looking in the same direction at the same time which can be more productive and a better experience. A similar approach to the hats could be used when considering time perspectives. Feedback can be given about the hat, rather than about the person – which seems to be easier for all involved. ‘I notice a few people still wearing their grey, past negative hats. Can everyone now put on their purple future hats.’

Future

The best way to predict your future is to create it!

Abraham Lincoln

Chapter 4 discussed setting your vision, which encourages you to think about your future, and start to create it. One activity was to think about your 80th birthday and your achievements. A key element of the future time perspective is the ability to set and achieve goals. Goals are covered more fully in Chapter 7. After exploring catastrophization – where people worry and imagine a negative chain of events happening in the future – I then return to thinking about your future by touching on retirement.

It may be odd that a book entitled Great Days at Work discusses retirement, but to quote Stephen Covey, ‘begin with the end in mind’, and since retirement follows work that’s the ‘end’ I would like to invite you to consider.

I will invite you to take a cursory look at your retirement. Depending on where you are in your career this might be very long term – and much can change between now and then – or a much shorter timescale whereby you might think there’s not much time left to make changes or provisions for your future. I’ve discovered that there’s never an ideal time to consider how you want to retire.

As described earlier, events in the future can reach back and affect us in the present moment. This

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