“PASSIONS”
When Dad was sober he would have been proud of me!
Most great efforts and sustained quests in life are products of personal passions. Unfortunately for most of us, we spend much of our days in life pursuing life’s “requirements” and not our passions, those life’s callings that energize our actions, sometimes beyond logic and practicality. It’s been said by much smarter people then myself that if you can combine what you’re naturally good at, with what you’re passionate about, the end result can be nothing but spectacular.
The vast majority of people don’t get the opportunity to pursue a path that really fires them up, nor do they get to do what they’re good at. Most are stuck in a less-than-wonderful relationship between a paycheck and their bills, dependents, physical impediments or just limits of everyday life.
I’m lucky. I have the opportunity to teach clients hands-on and thru my speaking (all of which, with modesty aside, I’m very good at) work values and to do this with the passion I’ve had since childhood.
The birth of that passion came from the adversity of growing up with an alcoholic parent. I’ve used the joke many times, I think my father once read a road sign that said “Drink Canada Dry" and took it to heart.
For the better part of 25 years, my dad tried his darnedest to drown his sorrows. The truth is that alcohol can’t drown your problems, at best, alcohol can only irrigate them! (You can chuckle at this if you wish). The real damage he did, without real intent, was the effects his addiction had on our family.
Suffice it to say, there are numerous personal accounts of so many people’s lives affected by substance abuse. I’ll only talk about one result for me, and that is passion (there’s that word again) to root for the underdog, to rescue the downtrodden, to re-educate the bully, to stop one person’s abuse over another. Specifically, I’ve pointed those efforts to the workplace and employee job satisfaction.
If I have my way, some day all bosses, and those aspiring to be a boss, would have a meter in their foreheads that monitor their “jerk quotient”. As long as the needle is low, employees can feel valued, trusted and needed. But, don’t get the wrong idea! If you’re reading about my passion for the first time, or if you haven’t been to one of my seminars, you might make a leap of judgment that I’d like to sit hand in hand with client employees and group sing “kum-ba-ya”.
I’ve learned hard lessons on when and where to draw the line between compassion and self destructing employee work values and attitudes. On behalf of my clients and past employers, I’ve participate in hundreds of employee terminations over the years.
The point of all of this is, my internal fire, what really rings my chimes, comes from a childhood that included verbal and emotional abuse. And the most common side-effect of such a childhood is low self-esteem and low expectations for life.
These feelings come back to me often when I’m contracted to intervene in a client’s organization. The simple truth is that some employers, whether by DNA, childhood socialization or organizational environment, are just plain nasty! Mean bosses, indifferent supervisors, and employers that don’t seem to care about employee job satisfaction and enrichment. These are the bosses I want to change.
Neither I nor any of my family or our friends could change my father before he realized the real damage he did to our family as a family, and as an organization. But, with great satisfaction, I’ll brag that I’ve been successful for many years at adjusting employer approaches, retooling many employee’s attitudes and beliefs and guiding organizations to better communicate and motivate employee talent at all levels.
Dad taught me one thing for sure, that most addictions are destructive. Most! My addiction is improving workers mind sets, their self esteem, resultant productivity and leadership motivation.
Seeing employee’s morale and spontaneous drive climb to new levels is a satisfaction for me that must be similar to the feel good mind set of some hallucinogenic drug. I’ve been main lining that experience for more than 40 years and that’s what my HR talent work is all about!