A couple of things have grabbed my attention of late. The first is a Starfleet article about caring. Not a thing you tend to hear much in the cut-and-thrust corporate world that I inhabit. Nevertheless, it resonated with me, and I think in the round it matches my view of the world. The article was written by a chap, let's call him Stan, who was starting out as a trainer in Starfleet, and had been assigned Fred as his mentor. Stan recollects his first meeting with Fred:
When Fred and I first met, he said to me, "Stan, I want you to tell your students something from me. Would you do that? Tell them, 'How you handle people will determine how successful you will be.'" I said I would, and I have.I may have written about this before*, but I have a simple approach to life. I have core values by which I live my life, both in and out of work, and I have layed out my stall as to how much of my life I will give to Starfleet. This translates in to me having a limit as to what I will do for work. That is not to say that I shirk or let my colleagues down, since teamwork and doing what I say I will do is one of my core values, but I will not work to stupid o'clock for no reason, I will not work weekends for no reason, and I will not take a job that I know will take me away from home regularly.
He went on to share that what he meant was that we must be authentic, we must be truth-tellers, and we must really care about others. Quite simply, he said, "It is all about the relationship."
I know for sure that this stance is limiting my work possibilities. Again, that is not to say that it is affecting my working role now, in which, if I say myself, I am doing pretty well at the moment, but I am finding it limiting when I am looking for other opportunities within Starfleet. It is a massive organisation with massive potential, but so much of the work now is "assignment based" which means you do an assignment for a period of time, and you generally travel to wherever that assignment is based, be it just down the road or at the other end of the country. Finding interesting new roles that are a bit different from my current role and that I am skilled to do is proving tricky. I realised this fully when I happened to become connected to an old boss on LinkedIn, and realised that he has been gone 2 years and I had been having "what am I going to do next?" chats with him for the year before that.
The other thing that has grabbed my attention has, in the time it has taken to write the words above, ungrabbed me and done a runner. I cannot remember what else I wanted to say, so I will say nothing.
On that note, have a good weekend and speak next week.
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* but if we follow the music principle that "there has been nothing new in music since Bowie in '76", then there probably has not been anything new in the written word since I don't know when, and so plagiarism, even of yourself, is probably OK.
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