People often do their best work when they are positively engaged rather than partly engaged or pretend engaged. This sounds obvious but it can be important to recognise your different levels of engagement. Let’s explore these themes.
Positively Engaged
What are the activities where you feel positively engaged? What are those where you feel alive, alert and want to do your best? What are those where you sometimes go into a state of flow?
Different people give different answers to this question. Here are some of the things they mention.
Positively Engaged – I feel
positively engaged when I am:
Encouraging certain kinds of people … Playing the piano … Cooking nutritious food … Working in my garden … Doing interior design … Solving technical problems … Working in the hospice.
What do you do right when you are positively engaged? You may look ahead, prepare properly and rehearse what you are going to do. Moving into action, you may focus fully on the situation and work towards the desired picture of success.
If you wish, try tackling the exercise on this theme. This invites you to complete the following sentence.
Let’s assume you have clarified some of the activities where you are positively engaged. It may also be useful to recognise another experience.
Partly Engaged
What are the kinds of situations where you may feel partly engaged? Sometimes you are able to be fully present, sometimes you are not. Sometimes you are interested, sometimes you are not. The feeling is:
“I could be spending my time doing something more worthwhile.”
How do you behave then? What are the consequences – for you and for other people – when you behave this way? Let’s explore some of your options.
One approach is to try to avoid putting yourself into situations where you feel partly engaged, but sometimes this can be difficult. Bearing this in mind, how can you manage such situations?
One approach is to plan ahead and decide how you want to behave in the situation. If appropriate, it is to ask yourself:
How can I be professional? How can I play a positive role and support other people? How can I make a positive contribution in the situation?
This can work for a while. But you will need to prepare properly and rehearse how you will behave in the situation. Sometimes you may need to buy time and not react to triggers that can send you into a negative spiral.
Pretend Engaged
What are the situations where you may feel pretend engaged? You may feel uncomfortable, unreal or must make a real effort to appear to be fully present.
Something bugs you. Maybe it is simply the situation. Maybe it is the values of the people that you are with. Maybe you find it hard to believe in what they or you are doing.
You may summon-up energy to do your best, but afterwards you may get headaches or other symptoms. You may also find that continually putting yourself into these situations can have consequences for your health.
Positively Engaged
In The Future
Looking ahead, imagine that you want to focus on the activities where you feel positively engaged. Taking this step sometimes required planning. One manager described how they tackled this challenge.
“Looking back at my work pattern, I found that I felt positively engaged only 20% of the time. This was having an effect on both my personal and professional life. Looking to the future, I decided to do three things.
“First, to list the activities in which I felt positively engaged. These included selling to certain kinds of customers. Second, to spend more time doing these things. Third, to show the business case for doing these things by getting some quick wins.
“This approach proved successful. I began to put together the high points like a string of pearls across the week. Within six months I was spending 80% of my week doing stimulating work that brought benefits to the company.
“There are still some meetings where I feel partly engaged, but I try to be professional and make a positive contribution. I feel much happier in both my personal and professional life.”
Imagine that you want to put yourself into more situations where you feel positively engaged. How can you do this in your own way? What may be the benefits – both for yourself and other people?
If you wish, try tackling the exercise on this theme. This invites you to complete the following sentences.
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