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Happy staff can make all the difference to the success of your business. So why does it seem like an impossible dream?
The Problem
Little did we know back then how much this 100 cover restaurant and takeaway would affect our lives.
As I look back over the years, as joint proprietor of my own business initially with just one member of staff and eventually running a busy seaside seasonal restaurant with up to thirty staff, what seemed to be the biggest problem and headache for myself and all the other business owners was always on the subject of staff, finding and retaining staff.
If only I had known back then what I know to be true now.
It seemed like the problem was out there, like our town was unique in that nobody wanted to work, this was in the beautiful quaint fishing town called Whitby in North Yorkshire, and the funny thing is that now I live in a beautiful seaside resort on The Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia and I hear all the local restaurant owners say the very same words. Complaining about the ability to find staff looking for work, coming up with a variety of reasons why it is so and the impossibility of it ever changing.
The Secret
You probably won’t believe me but none of it is true, either the fact that you can’t find good staff or whether they will stay or leave.
What I do know for sure, is that every person who says this, including myself back then, was looking through a particular lens, making assumptions through the beliefs, stories and experiences collected through life, creating what looked like reality but in effect is an illusion, just a perception and not the whole picture.
In fact, when I look back in a different way, we had some staff that stayed and worked at the restaurant for years and who still keep in touch and reminisce about the good old days at the Quarterdeck.
The truth is that we never had a staff problem, and neither do you, it is and always was, a thinking problem.
I am sure when you look at your own situation, whether you are a member of staff or the owner of a business, sometimes you will enjoy work and other days you will just not want to be there. This is normal. We all experience up’s and down’s, low moods and high moods throughout the day.
Whether our day at work is good or bad depends on our mood, the thoughts we are paying attention to and how we are adding meaning to those thoughts.
For example: you are working in a restaurant and the night before your manager seemed to be in a particular grumpy mood and to you, it appeared like their energy was felt by not just you, but by everyone else in the restaurant,
It seemed like the energy was low because of him/her.
The next morning on your way to work, you feel a sense of dread at how bad work is going to be because of your manager, and then, you get to work become involved in the busy day and realize by the end of the shift, you had fun, the energy was good and the team worked together.
Had your experience of work been coming from your manager or anyone else’s mood or the circumstances at work, then you would always feel the same way, but you can walk into work, be busy and distracted from our co-workers mood , focusing on the job at hand and realize you can be ok, content even happy in your work.
We make stuff up all the time, like making a movie in our mind. We get tricked by our thinking and then believe that it is real.
Some of the thinking that occurs when we are experiencing a low mood:
Tired
Bored
Stressed
Anxious
Paranoia
Jealousy
Insecurity
Fear
Lack of motivation
Lack of confidence
Overwhelm
Feeling trapped
Pointless
I am sure you can add your own to this list
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
– Anaïs Nin, author
How Can I Change The Way I Feel?
The best course of action is to do nothing.
Don’t try to change your thinking as it just tends to clog the machinery and gets in the way of our natural ability to re-set.
Educate
Imagine as you deepen your understanding around how life truly operates, what a difference this makes to how you relate to life and how in turn, this effects the behavior of those around you.
Whether you are an employer or an employee, you will find that over time, you just feel better, more at ease and even though some days you will feel down and fed up.
Once you have glimpsed the truth, a knowing that your experience is coming from the thoughts you are paying attention to in the moment and not from your circumstances, what happens is that, over time you find you have more days feeling at ease and less times when you get lost and tricked in the illusion, even when you are serving the most grumpiest of customers or clients.
Because we see and feel circumstances at the same time, it looks like they are correlated.
But when you know that your thought/feeling connection is doing its thing every day, , fluctuating, moving up and down, changing for no reason, just because it does, then you don’t have to pay attention to the feeling, adding meaning to it, it would just become a feeling that you can let pass by, knowing another one will come along shortly.
Someone who has a low level of understanding of the inside out nature of life and the human operating system, might get really stressed when they have a perceived bad day at work.
A person with a deeper under-standing will see where their insecure feelings are coming from and most of the time be able to step back , maybe take a few breaths and walk away rather than have an argument.
The individual who has gained more insight into the tricks that fool us, realizes that what they capable of doing is irrelevant to the feelings that are being created moment to moment. They can go to work with whatever feeling they are showing up with. They can be nervous, scared, have anxiety, stress and realize if they just keep taking a step forward, slowly the thought/feeling connection becomes irrelevant.
Imagine how this understanding would benefit not only the work environment but increase a sense of wellbeing in every relationship whether with work colleagues, loved ones or potential clients.
Results
You can be happy no matter your circumstances, when you realise the trick behind how life works.
Resulting in
Happier work environment
Less stress
More ease
Increased production
Increased profit
Staff retention
Happier relationships out of work
Better health
Better sleep
Increased Motivation
Increased Confidence
Clear head
More creativity
The human system just resets of its own accord, we are programmed to do this, but somewhere along the way we learned through our thinking that we had to do something in order to change our thinking, change our moods, search for meaning, search for happiness.
Happiness and wellbeing is at the heart of each and every single one of us, all we have to do is stop looking on the outside to fix our problems.
Don’t worry too much about whether these words make logical sense to you, sometimes you just notice a change in the way you feel, a sort of wellbeing and that is much more reliable than a logical understanding.
For further reading, here’s a link to a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago relating to stress, fears and anxiety in business.
If something in this post has sparked a curiosity within you, send me a message and between us we can arrange a mutually convenient to connect and have a chat.
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