It’s Your Career—When the Words, “Enjoy the Journey” Suddenly Make Sense

The “It’s Your Career” series at Management Excellence is dedicated to offering ideas and guidance on strengthening your performance and supporting your development as a professional. Use the ideas in great career health!

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Almost all of us have heard some variation of Remember to Enjoy the Journey at some point in our lives. Whether it was our parents or grandparents offering hard won advice to our younger selves or, an experienced manager sharing perspective on a tumultuous period at work, these words likely bounced around and then exited our brains at the time, with little thought to their truth and significance.

For most of us, the focus much of our careers is on the next step, the next rung and the next week or quarter. We’re myopic in pursuit of some form of so-called success—usually the next promotion and a bigger paycheck. And then you blink and you measure time in your career in decades and suddenly those words boomerang back and in a moment of clarity, you are your parents or grandparents and you understand exactly what they meant by Remember to Enjoy the Journey.

And you panic because you’re not sure you appreciated the people and the experiences together enough. Yet in hindsight, while the journey was tumultuous, the path often unpredictable and the obstacles unexpected, you know you had more fun than pain. In particular the people you fought together with in pursuit of those long forgotten goals are now the only memories worth anything to you.

Of course, Remember to Enjoy the Journey is guidance for our lives, not just our careers. When things happen you don’t expect, this is placed in painful perspective. You never fully appreciate a beloved parent quite as much as when they’re no longer there. The recent, sudden loss of a relative…a gentle giant and prince of a man in our family reminds me that I could have worked harder at appreciating him while he was here.

For the workplace, I’ll offer a few suggestions to help you keep your own journey in perspective. Even the most experienced of us can use a reminder to enjoy the ups and the downs, because together, they make up the journey. As you go about your business and navigate the politics and issues that seem so important, keep these thoughts in mind:

5 Ideas to Help You Enjoy the Journey Just a Bit More:

1. Stop trying to change people. You cannot. Appreciate your team members for who they are and what they do, not for who they are not and what they don’t or can’t do.

2. Take a new approach to disagreements in the workplace. Most dysfunctional workplace fights emerge because people are fighting over their respective positions (views) when in reality, it’s the interests (what people truly want to achieve…not how they want to achieve it) that count. Strive first to understand the interests of your counterparts and skip the fight over approaches. Build bridges by helping each other achieve interests.

3. Tackle the big problems with vigor and speed. No one who ever uttered the words, Remember to Enjoy the Journey, intended to say that the journey would always be enjoyable. It’s not. Recognize that the today’s biggest problems are the richest in opportunities to learn and grow.

4. Surround yourself with people who share your values and your joy in pursuit of building whatever it is you are building. There’s no substitute for great team members. They can be challenging, quirky, different and have very different world-views. Just make sure the values are aligned and the goals are the same. Great team members truly bring joy to the journey.

5. Say “Thank You” a great deal more. There’s nothing warmer for both the giver and receiver than a heart-felt “thank you.”

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Seriously, remember to enjoy your steps on the journey every day. You won’t repeat this day or pass this way again.

Have your own thoughts on keeping it all in perspective? Share them here. We’ll all benefit!

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