Most people take themselves way too seriously but don’t take their outcomes seriously enough. Here’s a thought: What if you took yourself lightly and took your outcomes seriously?
I’m serious about that. Too many people are way too uptight in the workplace. They’re unwilling to laugh at themselves. If you’re unwilling to laugh at yourself, how are you ever going to get through all the challenges in the workplace?
I have a client CEO who said to me one time: “If something really awful hasn’t happened by Friday at four o’clock, I go home before it does.” Well, that’s how it is in the workplace—things go wrong, things are challenging, things can go badly.
So, if you take yourself too seriously, if you let those things get to you, work will be hard and joy will be minimal. But if instead, you decide “hmm, those things happened” and your motto is “and then that happened, I’m getting on with it”—that’s taking yourself lightly. By simply letting go of the bad things that happened, after getting the lesson, you will reset faster and get much better results quickly. And, you’ll have a lot more joy…