Be Like Ryan

I just go back from my car place, Tower Auto, where the young guy I deal with was working on detailing my wife’s car until 10 PM last night. Now detailing is not his job. He is more of a service manager but he so enjoys helping his clients that he was willing to stay late to try to remove some stains that had developed on the outside of the car.  Ryan is really into cars and he loves working at this car place. They treat him well and he sees that he has a future where he can move up through the ranks. He does a lot of everything and enjoys it all.

Ryan is fully engaged in his work. But not everybody is as engaged in their work as Ryan is and one of the main reasons is because the workplace can often times be so demanding. Poor management, work overload, dealing with crazy customers are just a few of the things that get employees so stressed that they slowly start to withdraw from their job. And when they do, performance and satisfaction go down the tubes. Resilience is a great approach to building engagement in your job. It’s worth the effort to become more engaged as you will find your job more satisfying and, like Ryan, will look forward to going to work everyday. There are several principles from our Resilience Advantage program that you can put into play for yourself:

1. Go ahead and tackle problems on your own. You are probably smarter than you think and solving workplace issues will give you a greater sense of control and will move projects forward.
2. Believe that good things will happen. Ryan doesn’t know that he’ll advance in his job, but he is convinced that good work and effort will pay off.
3. Actively move towards challenging situations and take them on as projects to achieve. Ryan was convinced that he could get rid of all that stain that was on my wife’s car. He got most of it and that was probably a lot more than I would have gotten off the car

Engagement is often thought of as something that benefits employers but the real truth of it is that if you are engaged in what you are doing, you’ll have a lot more fun. ]]>