Chapter Eleven: The Waiting Game

Everyone has a vision for themselves and for the lives they expect to lead, both personally and professionally. We picture how we will spend our time, what we will accomplish, advancements in our careers, adventures we will experience. There's no limit to what we can imagine for ourselves. The same can be said for the lives of our businesses. We imagine how we might pass that next threshold for clients, for profits, or services, for reach.

Imagination, though simultaneously fun and critical, is not proactive. We must decide what we do with that imagined vision. There are those that take steps to make it their reality, and those that simply wait for something, anything, to happen. Days pass, years go by, and suddenly it feels too late to change anything. We've waited ourselves into a position where we feel stuck.

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Making Plans

Isaac Newton's First Law of Motion says it best: "An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." It's actually physics! By continuing to do the same as we have always done, we will continue to live the lives we have always lived. Another word for this could be stagnation.

Not everyone desires big personal or professional changes, and that's okay, but those that do must become the unbalancing force in their own lives. We must decide what we want, make a list of all that needs to happen in order to achieve what we want, and create realistic, but strict, deadlines for when these tasks must be accomplished. Then the real work starts, the doing.

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Making Excuses

To become our own unbalancing force sounds uncomfortable. Who wants to be unbalanced when our comfort zones are safe and familiar and oh, so convenient? Change can be daunting, but without it, we cannot grow and are left to wonder what might have been. The unknown can be terrifying, but fear should not be allowed to hold us hostage from what we truly desire.

Maybe courage isn't the problem, and we're just experiencing a lagging willpower or habitual procrastination. We have to then ask ourselves, at what point does procrastination turn into plain old giving up? We do not have an infinite amount of time to play with, and yet we tell ourselves we will do that thing tomorrow, or set aside time over the weekend, or after the holidays, or, or or.... It's too easy to assume that someday everything will just work out the way we want it to, or the way it's supposed to. Why wouldn't we want to take control for ourselves and put in the work to ensure the outcome we can't stop imagining?

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Making Moves

For some of us, once we have a certain vision for the future, it is quite impossible to wait. Waiting only means delaying results, or maybe never reaching them at all. The longer we wait, the easier it becomes to accept standing still. There are plenty of people, especially entrepreneurs, who are not capable of merely treading water. We are consistently striving to be the unbalancing forces in our own lives, always striving for more.

Sometimes the greatest motivation of all is seeing results. That validation is tangible proof that all our previous efforts are paying off. Then the cycle repeats. We don't want to lose the ground we've gained, or the momentum driving us forward. This leads to even bigger and better results. Then the realization hits us, that everything is beginning to take the shape we had imagined for ourselves like a vision board come to life.

As previously explored in Chapter Ten: The Great Reevaluation, there is great freedom in investing in yourself. Learn the difference between strategizing and waiting. Waiting should never become a habit, especially if we are waiting out of fear. Life is happening now and it won't wait for anyone. After all, we are only what we do, not what we say we'll do. It's okay to want more as long as we are making consistent effort to earn it.

Is there an aspect of your business or brand that you've been waiting on to improve? Stop playing the waiting game, because there will be no winners. If you need assistance, guidance, or expertise to move forward, then consider that your next step. This is what Noteworthy Communications does every day for business owners who are done waiting and are ready to make real moves toward that vision they have in their minds.

Chapter Ten: The Great Reevaluation

This time of year, people tend to become reflective about what they accomplished in the previous year and what they hope to accomplish in the next. With a new year looming ahead, people are sharing their goals and resolutions for what life might look like in the future. Another topic of widespread discussion around the country has been what is referred to as The Great Resignation, or the drastic changes in the American workforce that have seemingly left employers without laborers.

For nearly two years, the world has been reconciling our typical way of life with the harsh realities forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic. So many changes have taken place that are overwhelming to consider, both in our daily lives and in our long-term planning. It’s only natural that this had led to what we at Noteworthy Communications instead refer to as The Great Reevaluation, because these reckonings brought on by the pandemic go far beyond the workforce, rather affecting every aspect of our lives and the changes we want to make for improvement.

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Looking Back

What is often left out of discussions about hiring and employee retention is that most people aren't just up and quitting their jobs with no plan on how they are going to provide for themselves. They aren't leaving jobs to languish on the couch and watch television all day, as plenty of abandoned employers might want us to believe. Most people are finding better opportunities elsewhere or have even created their own opportunities where none previously existed. There are countless reasons why employers might be losing workers. Over the past two years, the death count and the retirement count across the entire workforce were above average due to the pandemic, not to mention those that used the pandemic to go back to school or switch careers altogether.

A business is not entitled to employees. Staff must be enticed to join a company and they must continually be enticed to stay. If a certain business is having drastic retention difficulties, perhaps the answer lies with them. Making broad claims that everyone is lazy and no one wants to work anymore is an easy out, but ultimately false and useless. Maybe people just don't want to work under poor leadership or in a toxic environment anymore. Writing people off as lazy won't solve any of the issues at the heart of this problem, but could result in even further loss of skilled workers.

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Looking Ahead

When people are given time to evaluate their priorities and how they may or not align with their reality, they will make the changes necessary to realign their lives to reflect those priorities. So many of us had become accustomed to being unhappy or unfulfilled because our time was accounted for and our ends were meeting. The daily grind had worn us down so much so that only the ramifications of a global pandemic could make us pause long enough to reevaluate our circumstances.

The pandemic has a way of highlighting the worst that our society has to offer, on the individual level and within our longstanding societal and governmental systems. When we evaluate how this affects our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing and the direction our lives are taking because of it, why would anyone want to lean into that negativity? If employees do not feel valued by their employers, either in their paycheck or in their overall treatment, the natural next step is to make a plan to make a change.

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Here and Now

If we must spend a certain amount of time every day, which adds up to years of our lives, away from our loved ones in service of someone else's bottom line, demanding more in terms of compensation, work-life balance, and overall workplace culture should not even be a question. As an example, if employees don't feel protected by their employers when working with the public during a global pandemic, of course they will find other employers who will make their safety a top priority.

Those who choose to embrace this reevaluation can become excited by the opportunities and the changes ahead, and even feel a sense of empowerment at the various news roads before them. Those who cross their arms, dig in their heels, and demand for things to get back to normal will forever be disappointed. There is no going back, only forward.

As previously discussed in Chapter Nine: Disconnect to Reconnect, taking a break from online spaces can be beneficial to our mental health. Similarly, choosing to remove oneself from real-world negative spaces can do wonders for a person’s overall wellbeing. If an employee dreads going to sleep at night because they know they’re going to have to wake up in the morning only to go to a toxic work environment with poor leadership, soon enough that employee will face their own Great Reevaluation, and they might just realize that their values are not being met.

The world has been irrevocably transformed and so have our priorities. Noteworthy Communications itself was born as a direct result of The Great Reevaluation, as have many other small businesses and creative ventures. There is a liberation in deciding to choose yourself, invest in yourself, and leave behind that which does not value or uplift you. The Great Reevaluation has arrived, and it has been a long time coming.

Chapter Nine: Disconnect to Reconnect

Modern technology and the rise of social media have changed our world forever, as well as how we all interact within that world. In so many ways, we have never been more connected. In many other ways, we have never been more disconnected. While there are undeniable benefits to using social media and incorporating certain platforms into our lives, we also have been made increasingly aware of the potential dangers of too much indulgence.

As with everything in life, balance is key for health and happiness, and this philosophy also rings true in regard to social media. Making the conscious choice to temporarily disconnect from these virtual platforms could be considered a form of healing and rest for a person who has developed an unhealthy attachment to social media. By disconnecting, for however short a time, from our virtual lives, we are forced to reconnect with ourselves and our flesh and blood lives in even more meaningful ways. We cannot afford to wait for media conglomerates to make positive changes to their platforms to improve our relationship with social media. It is up to us to decide when we need to disconnect in order to reconnect.

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Why Do We Use Social Platforms?

The reasons to participate in social media are numerous. Businesses can find great success in marketing their services or products to a wider audience. We can stay in touch with people who we cannot see regularly due to long distances or even just busy schedules. People have also had success in finding various support groups through social media. We can stay up to date on news and entertainment, or maybe just unwind with fun games or quizzes. A good meme also makes us laugh out loud every now and then.

Before we make any moves to disconnect from social media, it’s important to understand why we choose to engage with social media at all. Furthermore, we have to question why we use the specific social media platforms that we use. If we don’t understand the why before we make the change, we may never realize when we need to disconnect at all.

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How Do We Feel Using Social Platforms?

There have been multiple studies and findings about the negative effects of social media on mental health. This can occur due to increased opportunities for bullying, constant comparisons between our achievements and the milestones achieved by others, and warped perceptions of beauty, which can be altered with countless filters and photography tricks to give false impressions. Social media has also been proven to negatively affect our physical health, with instances of sleep deprivation skyrocketing and eye strain appearing in younger people than used to be typical.

Self-monitoring how we feel mentally and physically while engaging with social media is a crucial step in understanding what we could potentially gain by taking a break from the platforms. By choosing to disconnect, we allow ourselves the chance to refresh and recalibrate, getting back in touch with our own minds and bodies to discover what we need in order to feel healthy and balanced.

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Who Are We Outside Social Platforms?

By disconnecting from social media platforms, our minds are free to focus on our true selves, rather than a curated and artificial world behind glowing screens. We can remember who we are in the real world. We can reconnect with our honest thoughts, instead of amplifying our echo chambers. We can rediscover our values outside of algorithms designed to target all aspects of our lives.

By temporarily disengaging from social media, we rid ourselves of the distractions that take up so much of our time and we turn off the potentially negative spaces that can affect us subconsciously throughout the day and night. Social media can be addicting, so taking regular breaks to reconnect with other aspects of our lives might just strike the ideal balance we all need.

As previously discussed in Chapter Eight: The Megaphone Metaphor, we all possess our own platforms, both online and off, to share whatever we believe to be important. By disconnecting from social media, we give ourselves the time and space to reevaluate how we are using our megaphones and our social media presence, as well as what kind of impact we are making in the world and within our own consciousness.

Just because an individual may be ready to disconnect from social media doesn’t mean a company can afford to vanish from their platforms. At Noteworthy Communications, we take the responsibility of putting together a personalized social media package for local companies specifically so their focus can go to other priorities. Planning ahead with Noteworthy Communications allows business teams to disconnect so they are free to reconnect with what makes their business thrive in the first place.