Relentless Forward Progress

I have competed in two 70.3 Ironman triathlon races. Each of these took more than 6 hours for me to complete. If they were easy, they wouldn't be fun. Some of the key mentalities to keep is a lot of optimism and perseverance. I remember in my first race, about 2.5 hours in seeing a spectator with a sign that read "Relentless Forward Progress". This relates a lot to every day life, as well as the working life. There are a lot of people who have a hard time going to work in the morning because they hate it, or are tired of it. This is why I try to never look back at my bad days, and only reflect on my positive opportunities, and always learn something from every situation.

There have been a lot of long days at work. These are inevitable for anyone over the age of 15, where you actually stop working when you get home. These days can be difficult to make it through and stressful on everyone involved, but they are always worth it. Little do we know there is always a prize at the end of a long day, it all just depends on how you interpret it. Optimism is important in every day life, and like Simon Sinek posted, the right perception is what creates optimism. This allows us to continue to improve our mood as we watch our hard work pay off.

In order to adopt this mentality you also have to account for the small wins. Sure I didn't finish in the top ten of the race, or even in the top thousand, but I finished. A small win could be anything from making your bed in the morning to cleaning paper work off your desk. There is a short video about small wins that sparked interest in the scientific community that was recognized while Nobel Prize winners were working on their DNA model. They discovered that completing parts of their project were almost as rewarding as completing the entire thing. So remember, never stop progressing, and always stay optimistic.

Effort, Perseverance and Creating Opportunity

Nothing feels better than positive recognition in the workplace. When you complete a project, or even just have a performance review, there is nothing more satisfying or rewarding than your boss telling you that you are doing a great job.

It may be because as social creatures humans strive for recognition from our peers. It may be because we work so hard at what we do to better ourselves the recognition is a sign that we are making tangible progress. It may even be because no matter how hard we try we know there is always a way to improve or operate better.

Impressing your boss is something that you can do any day of the week. There is such an intimidation factor that is common between employee and employer, but usually the employer wants you to shine. In a video here you can find some advice from the psychologist Sam Owen about how to impress your boss. There are only a few things that are guaranteed to impress, but I will get to that later.

First we need to cover the basics of what every employer wants. They want to impress their boss, they want to achieve their goals, and they want to make the company successful.  Do these sound familiar? Is that what you are striving for as well? This is something that we all have in common at work that so many of us lose sight on. Even your boss is trying to impress their boss, and their boss is doing the same. This is why it is important to first understand that working together is the only way to achieve anything. If you carry on only looking out for yourself in an attempt to make yourself look better than everyone else you are limiting yourself by turning away and intimidating your co workers who could help you.

Cue the climbing the corporate ladder idioms. There is nothing that will take you farther than hard work. That is why work ethic tops my list of ways to impress your boss. Perseverance comes in a close second. Perseverance is important because you have to realize everyone has failures and everyone has hard times in their life. What matters is how you deal with those situations. I find that the harder you work and the more effort you put into something the more likely you are to find or create yourself an opportunity.