The BOLD (Well Done)
I have had several conversations recently with high-performing, wildly successful clients that revealed an insidious shadow side of success. The drive to do good work, to make and impact and to create a legacy sometimes drives us past the point where celebration is warranted.
My grandmother believed that if you praise children, they will stop trying.
This is a deeply sad belief. It is also a flawed approach that doesn’t accommodate how humans really work. We will intensify our efforts when we know that we are on the right track. We want that dopamine hit that a well-done provides.
A well-done delivered by a supervisor, a loved one, a constituent feels very good. It can ignite a boost of energy and reinforce healthy mindset and beneficial action. It won’t last, however. Stimulus like this rarely does.
What lasts is the well-done that we deliver to ourselves, that we incorporate in our sense of self, that we acknowledge that we’ve earned. In order to know that we have earned a well-done, we have to understand what we were trying to accomplish when we started. This means that planning is an ingredient of reward and a component of celebration.
How about that? We can plan to succeed, and we can plan to feel good about it!
Job satisfaction has less to do with what you do and more to do with who you are.
Mike Rowe
The Whisper (Terms of Satisfaction)
We do work to make a difference. We set out on a project because we want to create a change in a situation, object or system. We’ve been taught to create goals—S.M.A.R.T. goals. This framework teaches that powerful goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.
This is a good start.
That is a strong way to start a goal. The challenge, then, is knowing when you have arrived at the end. How will you know that the goal is attained and that, more importantly, you did a good job?
Before you set up your smart goal, envision the change you want to make and then define it. Now you have an image of your terms of satisfaction—the elements of success for this project. This is how you will know when you are done. Stephen Covey in his groundbreaking book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People called this starting with the end in mind.
Without a sense of the terms for successful completion, we won’t know when we are done. This has serious implications.
- If we don’t know we are done, we can waste time and energy in unnecessary effort.
- Without a sense of done, we have no way of knowing where we are in a project or of gauging our performance.
- Without a sense of completion, we cannot transition to the next effort, the next goal, the next season. We linger too long and we fail to start what’s next.
- When we don’t know what done looks like, we also don’t know what done well looks like.
No wonder so few people celebrate a job well done. We can’t celebrate a job well done when we aren’t sure it was.
In addition to the important ingredients of the S.M.A.R.T. goal, we must enrich the specific with another ingredient: a good, solid definition of what Julio Ollala calls our terms of satisfaction.
By thoughtfully constructing these terms, we can design a plan for change that will establish the goal line and enable us to celebrate when we’ve crossed it.
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