How to beat The Elephant.

Positivity and Elephants… who knew they went hand in hand hey?

Yet they do. At least, figuratively anyway.

Ya see, trying to find positivity in the daily grind, be it at home or in the workplace (and that includes relationships with whoever happens to share that space with you) is pretty tough if there is a massive Elephant in the room. We can skirt around the Elephant for a while, hell, we can go under it, around it or over it but we can’t go through it! There will inevitably come a time when we have to face it head-on.

This can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, a year or many years. And trust me, there are many different kinds of Elephants, some smaller than others but over time even the tiddlers grow into heffalumps if not taken out.

Confused yet? Don’t worry. So was I. The trick is to identify the Elephant.

This will require more than one post so this one’s about pachyderms at work.

The Work Elephant.

The work Elephant has many guises: it could be a project that’s overwhelming and impossible, a colleague who you don’t get on with or worse tries to sabotage your own work, a negative Boss, harassment, mobbing, inequality in status or pay, unrealistic targets, bullying (the list goes on..).

How to tackle the Elephant? Face it. A ha, here’s the tricky part but bear with me. In order to face it and win there is one FUNDAMENTAL thing you have to know (actually two things):

1)    Know your enemy/elephant.

2)    Know that only YOU and you alone can rise above and change things as no-one is going to do it for you.

Number one is pretty simple. Number two is the hardest lesson to learn in the world.

Finding your own inner positivity to fight external negatives takes a massive amount of self-belief, control, love and maybe a few too many knocks on one’s self-esteem to say “ok, I’m done here, I need to sort this out.” (See above “minutes, hours, days” etc...) It can take a long time to find all these elements but once you do, there’s no going back, you’re ready to go into the Jungle. Note, there are not many straight and lovely roads in the Jungle so it’s not going to be easy. Not impossible, but not simple.

So why positivity? Why is that so important? Surely being pissed-off is enough to get the ball rolling? EH NO! Anger on any level will put you on the same level as that damn Elephant. We need to rise above, people, and bang it on the head. I was reading an interesting article by Mike Robbins about how former Head of Learning Programs at Google, Erica Fox, set up a very cool method of boosting morale and positivity in the workplace by getting her teams to write short, positive messages on post-its and hide them in each others workspace. Just once a week but it soon became infectious and, as a result, productivity rose and meetings became much more open. INCLUDING talking about their flops and flaws. So as it was all in the open, nobody could bitch about what so-and-so did or didn’t do. This simple (and they always are simple) idea to get people to build-up others, and get the same in return, was genius. YOU can take this and use it. Take the positive elements of that annoying Colleague and tell them. Take the positive elements from the meeting and put them in a circular, this may lead to allow you to talk about that impossible project and get positive feedback that helps. The colleague may just realise that he/she can be appreciated and therefore, be nice (nb. this could take time...)

Ah but what about the mobbing, inequality and pay I hear you cry! And here’s the thing. Sometimes, you can’t beat the Elephant but you can leave the room, and lock the door. Hard, tough but necessary. Patty McCord, former head of HR at Netflix was giving a talk on this very issue not so long ago and one lady asked “How do I ask for a raise?”  silence followed for a few tense seconds...

To cut a long story short, she answered that sadly, many of us, especially women, who need to “ask” know that we are worth it and and know that we ain’t gonna get it. “So I have to leave my job to get better pay?”.

“Yes” she said.

It’s that easy and that hard to leave the room. Take the reigns of your life, think, believe in yourself and GET OUT.

Good Luck hunters, be positive, face your Elephants!