My Sanity My Pride
Some days I feel like my head is about to explode, filled with genuine few worries woven into millions of worries suffocating my brain.
Some days I feel like a defeated man desperately looking into his past to explain his present situation.
Some days I criticise my past with prejudice, only seeing my bad actions with the hope of explaining causation between my past actions & present situation.
Those days I get overwhelmed by my worries & my disposition to bad luck, my SANITY becomes my only pride.
My SANITY becomes my only land to defend till my harvest day. My SANITY is the beta blocker for my pains and worries.
Those days I cry deep inside my heart, my brain sweating profusely but yet my SANITY keeps me going, keeps me smiling and keeps me fighting.
Those days my heart soak up so much water and my eyes starts leaking , my SANITY my PRIDE tells me to have a privacy and let it out.
My SANITY stops me from losing the will to live
My SANITY is the battleground for depression, suicidal thought and all self defeating thoughts
Every time I win these battles I celebrate inside and prepare for the next one
I know as long as I keep winning these battles, as long as I have my SANITY, things will be better.
MY SANITY MY PRIDE
Driving Performance Through Motivation Calculus
I read a book by Charles Handy titled Understanding Organisation and in one of the chapters he explained motivation using motivation calculus. That got me thinking about how businesses drive performances through incentives.
I realised that most businesses offer two types of incentives:
- Fish-Net Incentives: These incentives are advertised as added packages for joining the business i.e health care plan, car loan etc.
- Performance Incentives: These incentives are put in place to motivate employees so as to achieve business goals.
Businesses pay little attention to how performance incentives are structured and applied to achieve its goals. Not all businesses subscribe to this type of incentives but a lot of the ones that do assume financial incentives as the ultimate motivating factor to drive performances.
Also, businesses have the habits of coming up with random, not carefully thought and stereotypical incentives when trying to drive performances. To make it worse, the incentives are based on few people’s fantasies and then applied to the whole workforce.
The idea of incentives being used as one size fits all is counter-productive. This practice is based upon the principle that employees behaviours are driven by rational and logical motivation, that is financial incentives as the ultimate motivating factor.
For instance, if majority of the people in a team nurse the idea of getting a professional qualification. A financial reward that is not proportional to paying for the course would do little motivation or deliver expected result when compared to offering to pay for the course or offer proportional financial reward.
Another example, employees working long shifts and well paid but few holidays are less likely to be motivated by financial rewards than a week paid holiday even if the financial reward is more than the week paid holiday in monetary terms.
In large organisations, its common practice to have standard incentives that comes with being an employee of that organisation (Fish-Net Incentives). These incentives (package) is a contract between the employee and the organisation which is not correlated to the performance of the employee or that of the organisation.
So in essence, theirs a need for incentives to be multi-layered based on motivation factors across businesses when driving performance through incentives. The performance incentives should be divided into two:
- Standard Business Performance Incentives
- Departmental/teams Incentives (Smallest unit in the business)
The focus of this article is driving performance by understanding the motivating factor of the target employees. A dynamic departmental/teams incentives based on motivating factors of teams would be more beneficial when using incentives to drive performance.
In a well structured business, a competent team manager should have an idea of what motivates his/her team members. It is not enough to assume the motivating factor of team members is driven by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but understanding the immediate factors that would breath new life into the team which in turn drive performance of the people and the business.
In summary, businesses should alter their approach of using static incentives with the hope of driving performance.
Just because one dog jump at cat food does not mean every other dog would do the same.
Life through Lenses
How do you view this world? We all view life through different lenses depending on what float our boat. As a reflector, everyday provides a different lens to view life but in a consistent way. Searching for the meaning of life is an endless cycle and a fruitless search amidst an endless struggle of living life itself. In order to embark on this journey, you have to take yourself out of the struggles life present to you. DEATH is the answer to this search but unfortunately no one ever comes back to tell us the true meaning of life.
“HE WHO POSSESS THE TRUE MEANING OF LIFE LIVES TO TELL NO ONE.”
Is death the only answer? No, but one have to live life like a dead person by disconnecting himself from life struggles. This way is the spiritual path, the act of embedding oneself into the oneness of God. This is a journey of a life time and not one as a result of mid life crisis.
This brings me to the next question, does life experiences equate to the meaning of life? Absolutely no, it only provides scenarios for others to discuss, compare and either learn from it or reject it. The LIFE SMART ones take these scenarios and produce derivatives of these scenarios to add to their armour in the continuous struggle of life.
I’m sure am not the first person to tell you that life is a continuous struggle, even if you have everything you want or you have the world at your feet. Contentment, which is a desirable state in life also involve continuous struggle to maintain it. So no one is excluded; male and female, rich and poor. The good news is, no matter your situation “YOU ARE NOT AN EXCEPTION”.
The way an individual view life provides the foundation for his/her behaviours. Yes, some behaviours are genetic but seeing those behaviours in others reinforce such behaviours, which might be good or bad. So to effectively change behaviour, one has to review the lenses of which he/she views life. The way one view life is the pre-requisite for his/her behaviour.
“EVERY EVENT IN LIFE HAVE PRE-REQUISITES, WE JUST MEET THEM EITHER BY PLANNING OR ACCIDENTALLY”
Everything in life has a pre-requisite and the requirement has to be met before the event takes place. Even death has a pre-requisite; you have to be living for you to die.
For example, John dies as a result of getting hit by a car; the pre-requisite could be, the driver texting and driving, John walking on the zebra crossing with the thinking that the driver is required to stop by law while he is crossing but because the driver wasn’t paying attention to the road, he fails to stop and subsequently he hits John. The driver failed stop to help him and he died on the spot. Now, imagine a change in any of this event that need to happen to meet the requirement for John to die on that day such as John deciding to take taxi from his house to his destination as such he has no need for zebra crossing. You can say that’s DESTINY, and there are millions of ways John could have died on that day. But that’s not the point am trying to make here; the point is “NO EVENT IN LIFE IS IN ISOLATION, IT IS A PACKAGE THAT INCLUDES ANTECEDENT AND SUBSEQUENT”.
So, how do you view life and what do you see through your lenses. Use the simple tool below for self analyses; see what you discover about yourself. Few examples below,
Life Lens (Views) and corresponding behaviours.
• Life is not worth living – Suicidal
• Life is all about alcohol and women– Unlikely to be faithful to any woman.
The first step in changing ones behaviour is to modify his views of what his trying to change.
Problems and Solutions
“As we go through life, we create our own problems and solutions, how effective the solutions are define the next stage of our life” – Me
Life is all about problems and solutions, problem in this context is not contextually negative but just the different stages we go through in life. From the day a child is born to adolescence to adult hood, we create problems and solutions. What differentiate the problems created at these stages is the consequences and responsibilities that comes along with them.
A child’s problem is the responsibility of the parents to create a solution. Examples of those problems are education, food, clothing etc. At these stage the parent take the responsibility of creating solutions for these problems. How effective the solutions the parents provide to the child’s problem go a long way in determining the next stage in the child’s life. For instance if the parents fail to provide a solution (sending the child to school) to the child’s problem (education), the child might grow up to be an illiterate but that doesn’t mean his not going to be successful in life but his already at disadvantage. This dynamic is a natural agreement between the child and the parents.
As much as the parents take responsibility of the solution for a child’s problem. The child also create his/her own problem and solution like playing with toys (assemble and re-assemble).
As we grow older and move from one stage to the other, the complexity of the problems increases and the difficulty in matching those complexity with the appropriate solutions also increases. Theirs a need to understand that we all have different personalities either adapted or natural, and it does affect how we address the problems we create.
To be continued.
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