Spot the Difference between ‘Yes’ and ‘Hell Yes’
If your life is an orchestra, the loudest section is your career.
Feeling a bit off? The most meaningful answer is not to drink more water, wake up earlier for that workout, or start volunteering in your neighborhood. According to research, making even a small change in your career experience has an outsized influence on your overall lived experience.
Sometimes, and certainly for many of us post 2020, the adjustment we need is in the amount of weight we are carrying. Daily negative emotions have reached historic high levels. Our perception that employers care about our wellbeing is bleak, and the gap between perceived and experienced support has never been greater, between organizational leaders and those they lead.
If you admit to your boss that you’re struggling with your workload, they may tell you to work less, or take a vacation. They may even make a mental note of your capacity that lands you on the workplace equivalent of the “do not fly” list when it comes to future projects. But you are more beautiful than that. And your talent in your career deserves more sophisticated attention. Your contribution cannot be summarized into the amount of things you say yes to. You have to understand, love, and advocate for your “best yes.”
And if you lead a team, helping those individuals know, value, and perform in their area of “best yes” is not just a practical tool for managing and leading. It’s the heart of your entire role.
This is a long-game, and I realize it carries some privilege with it. I believe it’s worth pursuing, especially for those who have the safety to do so.
Your Best Yes
Study and adapt. We are defining what your energy is naturally drawn toward, so that you can fill your career experience with more and more of that over time. It starts with you understanding your strengths. Then, you get to notice what these strengths, plus your unique lived experiences combine to tell you about your ideal relationships. Pay attention to who you are with, what you are doing, and how you are growing when you feel the most at peace. Hold yourself accountable to regularly curating your discoveries (or find a great coach who can help).
The attached worksheet will help you walk through a series of actions that we could all be doing much more regularly, in pursuit of defining our real ‘hell yes’ ways of working. Not only does this separate those who work from those who work with joy, it’s what will seperate those who survive from those who truly thrive.
Get grounded.
Focus on now. Your best yes can change with time, space, place, and circumstance. For now, dream about an ideal experience that makes sense for where you are. Helpful ways to prompt this are: journaling daily, imagining yourself at peace, drawing your ideal post-work routine, or reviewing your calendar for the next 6 months and dreaming of how it might feel slightly better with meaningful change.
2. Identify gems.
What sparkles? Name your best days, your favorite clients, your trusted advisors. If you had to burn everything else down, what do you have now that you would you save?
3. Edit by omission.
You likely already know what needs to go. Be ruthless. What no longer serves you? Even if it’s an outstanding commitment, draft a blueprint of your day without the habits, roles, assumed responsibilities, or extra work that you no longer need. Treat this like a negotiation—be ready to cut back on more than you may actually end up with. Imagine what can be automated, delegated, or eliminated altogether.
Sometimes I’ll ask my clients to rank their tasks by 3 different categories. First is Importance: What matters most to success in their role? Next is Exclusivity: What is most crucial that they do, not someone else? Finally we rank by Joy: What is most and least fun? You’ll have numbers to help you, and I encourage you to remove at least the bottom 2 ranking items. You may not even notice they are gone.
4. Investigate your influence.
If you really want to learn what you’re good at, look to what others come to you for. Trust me, they won’t voluntarily ask you to do something they know someone else could do better, at least not more than once.
Gather understanding on your best contribution from your clients, your partners, and even your family or friends. Ask them when they see you at your best. Ask them if you were more available to them, what they’d want your support on. You’ll begin to build a picture of how your talent shows up in the world. Be nice to yourself–it’s almost impossible to do this alone.
5. Baby step.
With all wellbeing work, it’s more important that we make tiny changes than that we get everything right. This is easy to say, but honestly probably holds me back the most. It’s not that I want perfection–it’s that I underestimate the value of a small tweak.
Ask yourself: What can you remove from tomorrow’s day? What can you add to tomorrow’s day? What can you do differently before you go to bed? And once you get there, the only expectation you need is to evaluate how it went. No grand promises. No huge commitments. Baby stepping in the area of career wellbeing is more influential on your overall wellbeing than leaping, lunging, or sprinting might be in other areas.
Download Your Best Yes Worksheet
Note…
Do as I think about and research, not as I’ve done over the past 20 years: Despite my excellent, provocative writing (and humility) on the subject of healthy energy and boundaries, I’m unofficially diagnosing myself with a term I made up: “margin dysmorphia.” That’s a pseudo-joke to say I have a rather distorted understanding of what a healthy amount of work is for the energy I personally have to give. I’m all or nothing, and I admittedly associate my value with the “all” side of it. And here’s the truth: the antidote to burnout is nothingness. You cannot coach your way to a healthier version of Career Wellbeing when you’re in fight or flight mode, when you’re beyond stretched and into panic, anxiety, or apathy.
I truly believe we are on the cusp of change and growth in how we define thriving work life. It’s a difficult and important responsibility we have been handed–to learn from what works, to live our strengths out loud, and to pass along ways the next generation can experience more joy, more support, and stronger organizations. That’s how our world heals.
