In order to succeed in your professional life, you need to do more than just work on yourself. You also need to be open to other people. And that takes courage, explains psychoanalyst and coach Sophie Peters.
Relationships with work can be compared to a failed romance — they also fluctuate from love to hate, from hope to illusion. We also want self-realization and often face the same harsh reality.
Find pleasure in your duties
We want our work to have meaning, to allow us to express our individuality and integrate harmoniously into our lives without interfering with other interests and connections. It is important to find pleasure in what we do — not so much in the result, but in the process itself.
Even if we’re not doing anything extraordinary, being deeply involved allows us to slightly blur the boundaries of time, heighten our sense of self, and give more value to the work. The goal and objectives are secondary here.
In a marketplace where the rigidity of human relationships reflects the brutality of the economy, everyone becomes responsible for bringing some warmth into those relationships. To do this, you need to go a little beyond reasoning about personal performance.
We always define ourselves through dialogue. Sometimes this is confrontation, sometimes it is agreement with people who are significant to us. In human relations, it is not ideas and means that are important, but our employees and colleagues — those with whom we work. By changing jobs, we keep the memories of these meetings.
The most innovative companies today are those that encourage employees at all levels to share with each other, to listen to each other. Then everyone feels responsible and motivated. It is absolutely essential to restore not just faith in oneself — the cash cow of coaching in recent decades — but also faith in the other, an awareness of the importance of cooperation with others to build joint plans.
Willingness to act boldly
You also need to turn to your courage — one of the key engines of self-realization. We must try to change what can be changed, but at the same time understand that the result does not always depend only on ourselves.
In the old proverb, “Whoever wants, he looks for opportunities,” desire means more than opportunity, which is already an action in itself. The desire to act boldly and overcome our fear of failure when difficulties occur in work or we do not receive rewards for our efforts is an important component of self-realization. It is courage that allows us to move on, not allowing ourselves to accept what cannot be accepted.