Meandering Mind - Eva Dillner [17]
To discover your essence or thread of what you really do best, you are looking for that which makes you come alive. It's where your essence comes through. It's where someone could stand you up in a corner and you just keep talking because you are so excited about it.
My brother, when he came home from Marine Corps boot camp, talked non-stop about his experience. It was the most alive and happy I've ever seen him. He was really in his essence, he was so excited, and not surprisingly he graduated at the top of his class. As a child, he read all the military type comic books and studied Morse code.
He also took radios apart and put them back together, with no parts left over! - a skill that really impresses me. As an adult he's rebuilt lasers, he's got a hands-on practical technical ability that is quite special. When we were children, he learned how to wait tables and be of service. He has a knack for languages and is quite social. He wanted to be an airline purser, but he was too tall for the standards then. His MBTI type is ENFJ. Translated he is an extrovert, intuitive, feeler and judger.
A good way to discover your essence is to look at your passion. Is your passion to help people heal? as it is for one of my therapy colleagues. She will stop at nothing if she can help you heal. No matter the time nor place, she will put her hands on you to help you heal. That's her passion.
At a dinner recently, I watched a woman come alive as she described what she does. “I'm a pre-school teacher. I love teaching and helping form the children.” You could literally see her heart warm and the glow on her face as she talked about the children.
Seeing the essence or life energy in a persons face is the same process therapists use to catch unresolved emotions and issues. But instead of probing for pain, you probe for pleasure. The observation techniques are the same, just a different thread. Why not get together with one or more people to do this exercise? Simply watch and look for excitement. Observe expression come alive or go dead as the conversation meanders. Make sure to have as a ground rule to suspend logical practical thinking and just let yourselves play. Become fearless explorers of your own passions.
Nine
From theory to practice
It may be helpful at this point to go through in some detail what I actually did in the re-engineering examples I cited earlier. How did we get from A to Z?
Eliminating reports
Eliminated 75% of reports previously generated that were found to be non-essential.
I had moved into a new position that combined three jobs into one. There was no way I could do everything that three people had done previously. That was the whole point of consolidating jobs - to streamline while learning to learn to perform only those tasks that were truly essential. It meant prioritizing. Over the years, a large number of reports had been added to the routine functions of my predecessors. If I were to continue all of them, that in itself would have been a full time job.
How do you discover which reports are truly essential? Not an easy task. Call everyone on the reception lists? Make a survey and collate the results? Negotiate changes and consolidations? I had hit the deck running with this job and was on a fast track learning curve. There wasn't exactly a lot of time to schmooze with all the report recipients.
One day the penny dropped, the light bulb went on. Simply quit sending out the reports. Then wait for people to ask for the information they truly need. Sure enough, it worked. Turned out most of the reports that were previously sent out were never missed. The information people actually used was about 25% of the previous total.
One by one, people would call, “what happened to such and such report that your