The lovely Josephine Middleton over at Slummy Single Mummy has agreed to do this great guest post. Please make her feel welcome.
The meaning of life, long term goals, and the truth about what motivates us…
I’ve never really been one for long-term planning.
I know some people have a clear idea of what they want to achieve in life and by when, but I don’t, and I never really have. Becoming a parent at 17 pretty much threw any kind of family planning out of the window, and although, as I get older, I can see that things like getting married and owning my own home are probably Sensible Things To Do, they still seem pretty scary to me.
Events of the last week on the home front though have led to one of those moments – you know the kind, where you take stock a bit, question the meaning of life, consider selling all your possessions to travel the world, and then realise all you really want is to have a nice cup of tea and a chat with someone you love.
It’s not that I’m not driven – when I do something, I want to do it well, and when I put my mind to something that I really want, I tend to make it work. It’s more a matter of finding those things that I feel passionately enough about in the first place, the things that will make me want to get out of bed every morning.
Occasionally I wonder if it is money, but I know that when I do have money, it doesn’t make me any happier. So long as I can afford to pay the bills, eat out, and not have to shop in Asda, then I’m alright. I tried being thin (I say thin, that’s possibly an exaggeration… thinner than now at least, but not Cheryl Cole thin obviously), but that didn’t do anything other than make me look a bit tired and old.
Surprise surprise then, being rich and thin doesn’t make you happy. Funny that.
I watched this fantastic video on The Guardian website last week about what motivates us at work. It’s amazing to watch, and the findings are pretty clear – apart from in the most basic of manual tasks, increasing financial rewards actually leads to poorer performance. Money is not what drives us to do well. Instead it comes down to things like being able to direct your own work, learn new skills, and feel a sense of purpose.
The key of course is finding a job you enjoy that combines all of these. Before becoming self-employed last year, I worked for three years for the local mental health charity Mind in Taunton and West Somerset, and that job scored highly on one part of the motivation equation at least. My sense of purpose there was strong – as Fundraising and Development Manager, it was my job primarily to raise money, to raise awareness of the charity, and to challenge the stigma and discrimination still associated with mental ill-health. As an organisation, we had a clear mission, a much repeated mantra about what we wanted to achieve and what was important to us.
Coming from the voluntary sector to work in a more commercial environment has certainly been a change. I now have the freedom to completely direct my own work, and I’ve certainly been learning new skills and facing new challenges. What is less clear at the moment is my sense of purpose. At Mind, it was very clearly about people – I knew that any particular grant application I was writing was to raise money to help a definite number of people manage their mental health and improve their lives. In the private sector, the benefit to society and the balance between people and profit isn’t so clear.
This same sense of purpose is surely what motivates us in our personal lives too? Finding that purpose is the tricky bit… Wouldn’t it be great to be born with a clear mission statement, a set of aims and objectives that gave us a template for how to live our lives? I often wish I believed in God. I imagine that might give me a feeling akin to having a really good manager at work – someone you know is keeping an eye on you, someone you respect and want to impress, someone who you know you are accountable to. I don’t though, and I’m pretty sure it’s not something you can just choose to believe, so I can’t rely on the promise of an afterlife or the threat of eternal damnation to help me live a meaningful life.
Like many people then, I am left self-employed in my personal life too, responsible for setting my own standards, my own targets, and for regularly reviewing my work. As a parent, a women, perhaps just a person, doing all these things in a reasonable way is often hard. Standards? Targets? Easy, let’s just set them impossibly high, giving the opportunity to constantly compare yourself to other, apparently much happier and more successful people. Reviews? Well, that’s just that critical, unrelenting voice is your head isn’t it, the one that likes to pick up on every single thing you do, every mistake you make, and make you believe that everyone else has noticed and is judging you.
Perhaps that’s a little harsh, but you know what I mean.
Next week I have set aside time to think about work, where I am now, what I enjoy, and how I want to move forward. The results will hopefully be very focused and tangible, and give me a framework for the next twelve months that I can work to and monitor progress against.
I find it odd sometimes that we appreciate the need to plan and be proactive if we want to be successful and fulfilled in our work lives, but that we so often take our personal lives for granted, and are much less likely to nurture and invest time in developing and achieving our personal goals. Or is this just me? Maybe you have a very clear idea of what you want from all aspects of your life? How do you go about planning for the future and making sure you make the most of the one life we have? Answers on a postcard please…
Jo Middleton is a freelance journalist, single mother of two, and writer of the award-winning blog, slummy single mummy.
Thank you Jo for stopping by and doing this wonderful post. I hope you come back and visit again soon.
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