Reflecting on Putting Me First to Put the Business First

Thinking back on my goal of putting business priorities before my own goals and interests, I think the subtext is really about me being able to do a job when I don’t like it or just plain don’t feel like doing it. I’ve come to realize that getting excited about my work is really important for staying motivated. This is definitely a general trait for humans, but I’m realizing how prominently it shows up in my life. There have been times where I don’t like my job duties, and I have straight up just not done them…how I have gotten away with this, I don’t know, but I know I’m not comfortable acting this way in the future. I recognize there will always be times in life where I’ll have to do a job I don’t like, so this goal was intended to help me find ways to overcome those times. For this goal, I primarily focused on crafting strategies, project plans and means of accountability to help me make headway on projects I wasn’t particularly jazzed about. Looking back, it was always easy for me to ideate and get started with a project outline, but still hard to follow through on self-appointed action items and deadlines. Reflecting on this, I think it is important to me to work on projects with hard deadlines (rather than flexible, self-appointed deadlined) and in an environment where there is accountability. What I also ended up learning is that to some degree I can’t force myself to do the work, so I need to be even more mindful about the roles I take and get clarity ahead of time on the types of projects I’ll be working on.