Tim Noyce Advies

A few years back I had the great, good fortune to work in a team of people who had both great skills and great capacity for joy, one of whom came back from an assignment with a plastic, dancing cow that played the Mexican Hat song. It was immediately named “Hendrik” and promoted to “Vice President of Joy” (our employer had very many VPs). This lead to us developing, to the bemusement of our manager (though he did join in) the “Dance of Joy”. The Dance of Joy would happen every time some good thing, some success, new-baby, big new project or a sale, happend. The Vice President of Joy would be put in the middle of the floor, turned on and we would all prance around it, dancing to the music like happy maniacs, waving our arms in the air.

Good times….

What should you take away from this? I wish and hope for you, that you can find room in your life and work the for occasional Dance of Joy. Let your hair down and express your joyous feelings, let your guard down. Moments like these are literally the spice of life, they are more valuable and memorable than any quantity of off-site inspirational meetings. They also create and strengthen bonds and connections between you and those around you: you may find more people dance along than you expected…

But even if you do not have a dancing cow in your cupboard, you can have the Book of Joy. Don’t click away… I am not going totally Pollyanna on you and I am not founding a cult. I am merely suggesting you take a few moments, regularly, to compile a journal of successes. I started mine a while ago, when I was trying to work out how to get the most fun possible out of my work and deciding whether my current work was truly right for me.

All you need to do is, write down every occasion you can think of when you were truly happy with what you were doing and highly engaged with it. Turn off the modesty for a little while and describe the situation as well as you can and how you contributed. Carefully note what role you had (problem solver, manager, facilitator, negotiator, quality-watcher etc) and specifically which of your own special skills and attributes came into play: deep analysis, patience, empathy, enthusiasm, painstaking persistance and so on… As you go on, you will find some skills and roles coming back regularly, a picture will emerge. Naturally it is best to record a success as soon as possible, while your impressions are fresh, but there is nothing wrong with roaming through your entire history and childhood. You can record any situation where you had a really good feeling.

When I did this I was astounded by how many things I found and by the fact that I had forgotten a whole bunch of them when I read it six months later. I also became inspired to use my strengths in my work. More about that in another post…