 Recovering like a professional for your best Social Sector impact
We all know what it is like to do something hard. We are working through the night on a big project, waking up early to get a jumpstart on work, or concentrating our minds to finish off a document before the deadline. This is a universal moment when we give it our best effort through concentration In recent weeks I have been pushing my mind to the edge of my abilities by finishing up complex work projects with my team, and putting together proposals for new projects. On the athletic side, I put in the time and had some good luck, to complete my first ultra marathon, a 50k race through the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. These experiences got me thinking about the systems that we can put in place to recover from any big mental or physical push.
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 My human brain is wired for jealousy. This reaction happens with people in the Social Sectors like me, and also people working in any professional field. My negative default reaction when seeing someone else’s success is:
“that’s fine for that person but they are in another category and that is not even possible for me”. “That person who has that house is just lucky, they didn’t do anything to deserve that success, it was handed to them, even if they made it themselves” “I’m never going to be good enough, I might as well not try since this will never work out.” “That person sucks and doesn’t understand my life and work. We could never be friends.”  How Social Sector professionals can set up a personal performance system to thrive in an organizational change process.
My work with Social Sector organizations often puts me in contact with groups undergoing internal change processes. These small or large seismic movements seemed unusual and dramatic to me at the beginning of my career. Over time, I realized that organizational restructuring was common in the nonprofit world, and that certain patterns and themes repeat themselves as organizational tectonic plates shift over time. Each organization no matter the type, size or focus goes through change. While the timeline varies, the process of redefining a mission, structure, teams, and way of working, is universal to these Social Sector organizations.  Picture this: You wake up after 8 solid hours of sleep. You make a simple but nutritious breakfast for yourself and your family and sit together and enjoy the early parts of the day with a steaming cup of nice coffee. The kids and your spouse head off to work/school, you walk outside to see them off, then grab your backpack and walk a short distance to your workspace. This is a small structure of rough cut lumber nestled beneath tall pine and oak trees. Surfboards and kayaks adorn the ceiling above a large white board. After a few minutes of meditation, You fire-up the treadmill under your standing desk and light up your laptop and large monitor screen. Your workday has begun.
 The formula: stress + rest = high performance works for athletes, scientists and warriors. Why should Social Sector workers not adopt this approach? Learning this system can help us design cycles of deep focus and stress, and mitigate these with recovery periods that then allow us to focus again later with deeper attention and effort. We can use this approach to do better work, retain our focus over time, and enjoy life more outside of the job. This is a human performance lens for Social Sector performance.
 In today’s Social Sector world, your platform matters more than your resume. Building an online record of your ideas, creations and network is much more valuable than the classic and generic resume.
I remember the care and diligence that went into my Curriculum Vitae (CV) in the early years of my career. Hours crafting the sentences, anticipating the perception of future employers reading the text. My university helped people write their CVs instead of taking time to visualize and understand different work tracks and then build a set of contacts and actions around pursuing that path. They believed that the right sentence structure and sequence would magically unlock your dream life.  We experienced a mini natural disaster in Central Virginia last year. A heavy wind storm came in and knocked out power in our rural location. This gave me the chance to break out the generator and the chainsaw and for a brief time, put aside the standard 21st century toolkit of laptop, tablet and phone.
The ringing drone of the generator and the gasoline smelling hands from hauling the fuel can made me think back to times working on disaster assistance in places like the Philippines and Sudan where it is routine to be working off of generator power with the headlamp illuminating my hardbound field notebooks that I completed at night under the open sky.  Happy New Year! Thank you so much for reading and learning these high performance concepts with me. I started this New Year’s post a year ago, and quickly realized that I was still processing and did not fully have the tools to recommend a year-end planning approach. In the spirit of progression I turned to the Mindful Techie, Meico Whitlock to share a post on this issue. His guest post for 2018 on 7 questions for Social Sector Professionals to start the new year off right, is a great way to plan. Here is Meico’s list adapted for 2019:
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