I recently discovered author, blogger, podcaster, and leadership mentor Michael Hyatt, and have been learning a great deal from the various things that he puts out on the Interwebs. One that really caught my attention was a podcast episode titled, “Watch Your Mouth”. In it Michael gives several powerful examples of how simply changing the words that we use to describe things can transform how we feel about them. I’ve known about this principle for a while, but the specific word-switch that Michael suggested really stuck with me, and got me thinking more deeply about other places where simply changing a word or two could have a big impact on how I feel about something.
Not long after hearing that episode, I sat down to revamp my personal weekly schedule template (also based on a tip from one of Michael’s podcast episodes). I hadn’t reviewed this template — which I’d laid out in a spreadsheet in Google Docs — in some time, and was eager to give it a serious overhaul so that I could truly make it an effective tool for me. After opening the file, a single word caught my eye. This word was repeated in several places, used to label the bulk of my weekday (and some weekend) time on this template.
The word was “Work.”
Now this may not seem like much of a surprise. After all, that’s the same word that pretty much everyone who holds a job of any kind uses to refer to their efforts to generate income.
We talk about going to “work” in the morning. We are sometimes asked, “How was work?” after we return home. We ask, “Where do you work?” when meeting new people.
But “work” never stands alone. Whether stated or not, we’ve become accustomed as a society to view “work” as one end of a spectrum. In fact, it’s often viewed as being the less-desirable end. Have you ever heard the phrase, “Work is a four-letter word”? That about sums up how we’ve been trained to view “work.” In short, “work” sucks. It has always sucked, and always will suck.
On the other end of the spectrum is another four-letter word: “play.” If “work” sucks, then “play” is the anti-suck. We “play” to rid ourselves of the bad taste that “work” left in our mouths. The more that “work” beat us down, the more “play” we need as a release. On the flip side, we often feel guilty if we “play” too much, and announce that we need to “get back to work.”
From generation to generation, we’ve diligently passed along the the idea that “work” and “play” are polar opposites, like yin and yang. You hate one and love the other. It’s “just the way it is.”
As I sat there and saw these large blocks of time on my calendar template, all bearing the label “Work,” I felt myself beginning to get tense. At first I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew that I had to spend that time engaged in activities that would (I hope) generate the income that my family needs, but at the same time my mind and heart were caught by the stereotypical concept of “work” as something to be dreaded, all because of the label that I’d applied to those blocks.
What if I replaced the large blocks with smaller ones representing my actual efforts? After all, I subscribe to Barbara Winter’s idea of having “multiple profit centers,” and therefore could fairly easily drop the names of my “profit center” activities into the calendar.
However, I knew from past experience that I had to remain flexible. Working from home for the past three years has been great, but it’s been anything but predictable or regular. Locking down my calendar template too tightly actually made me less productive, not more. The larger blocks of time — within which I could sculpt each day as it needed to be sculpted — had to stay.
So I simply changed the labels on those blocks to “Play.”
Let me be clear: I’m not changing a thing about the activities that will fill those blocks. I’m simply changing the way that I view them by changing how I describe them.
I’m immensely blessed to be able to support my family doing several things that I love. The last thing I want to do is view any of those activities as a drudgery, a pain, or something less than desirable. That doesn’t mean that those activities don’t require effort. Some of them require quite a bit of effort, to the point where I’m sweating buckets in some cases. I’m simply using a different descriptive term as a subtle reminder that I chose these activities because I enjoy them.
What about you? Did you choose a career path because of something you enjoyed, only to find yourself disliking it later, perhaps due to years and years of calling it “work”? Do you think that you could reclaim even a portion of that original joy by simply choosing a different word? I’d like to think so. Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!