Early on in my podcasting explorations, I had a conversation with Charlie Gilkey, founder of Productive Flourishing on my well-being and conscious presence podcast, Today Dreamer (formerly called The Good People Effect). After the chat I felt so inspired by his wisdom on productivity and his methods to get from idea to done that I decided to write up a few potent takeaways from our podcast episode and his book “Start Finishing” into a simple and hopefully well put-together little blog post just for you.
Identifying your “best work”
So, how do we actually identify the stuff that matters most?
Charlie likes to think of it as doing our “best work”. Our best work is work that allows use to live a more meaningful life where we’re thriving instead of simply surviving. There’s a little checklist below, but if you’d prefer to watch a video, check out the YouTube video I put together on the topic of finding your purpose in life if you’re struggling to figure out what exactly your “thing” is.
6 Key Elements to Identify Your Best Work
Your best work is sacred
It is something dear to you that you see as worthy of respect and honour.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of giving the word ‘work’ a bad connotation and sometimes it may be deserved.
When it comes to your best work though, it’s important to look at it in a different way. It’s the work of your life and it should not only matter, but be treated with the utmost respect.
In your whole life you may only complete a handful of projects where you’ve actually put everything you had into it. Where the work has meant something to you and so you’ve given it your all. This is your best work.
Only YOU can do your best work
You are an individual and while you’re connected to everything and everyone in this universe, you are also a singularity.
In “The Art Of Being Yourself”, Caroline McHugh speaks about reconnecting with your true self and celebrating it. Your best work comes from being true to who you are and understanding that only you can create it through your own unique perspective and unique experiences.
Check out the video if you have a few minutes, it’s well worth the watch!
Your best work serves yourself and others
There’s a particular sense of fulfillment when we serve others. It’s also important to remember to serve ourselves to be able to better serve others. Our best work allows us to do just that. Doing things just for yourself leaves us empty inside. Doing things just for others may drain us just as much. The trick is finding the thing that makes us light up inside, while also being able to use it as a way to serve others.
Your best work requires really showing up
Showing up isn’t an easy thing to do. It means putting real effort in and finding your way through the many obstacles that appear in front of you. The great thing about your best work though is that it’s worth it. Making commitments to yourself and following through on them can be an infinitely rewarding experience. Besides, nothing worthwhile ever comes along easily and the lessons we learn from the struggle gives us the tools and experience to face future projects with more confidence and skills.
Your best work calls you from the inside
Your best work may or may not be tied to money. This doesn’t make it any more or less valuable, Important or necessary. It’s a deep fire within that just feels right when you think about it. You may need to dig a little deeper to discover what it is. You may need to search, experiment, try, be open, act spontaneously, listen, learn and explore to find your best work. One thing is for certain though, when you’ve finally found it, you’ll know. At that point it’ll be up to you to follow that feeling and see where it leads.
Okay, let’s figure out what might be holding you back (& how to move past it!)
So, for those of you who’ve found what your best work is at this point in your life, let's take a look at some common barriers to getting that good stuff done. According to Charlie the things that hold us back from being our most creative, productive and efficient selves all fit into one of five clear categories:
Competing priorities
Head trash
No realistic plan
Too few resources
Poor team alignment
Competing Priorities
We only have a finite amount of focus that we can point in the direction of our choosing at any given time. Gary Keller talks about this in his amazing book The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. It’s the idea that focusing on one project accelerates it, because it gets all your attention. The more you split your focus, the less energy you put into each individual project, the less they move forward.
A way around this is to become really clear about what your priorities are. This may mean axing the ones that don’t light you up inside or saving some projects for another time to concentrate on the ones that matter most right now. Back when I was working as a Creative in the ad industry thinking of hundreds of ideas every week we called it “killing our babies”. Letting go of our good ideas to pursue the great ones we connected to the most.
Head Trash
Head trash as Charlie likes to call it is negative self talk. The things we tell ourselves that hold us back from moving towards our best selves. ‘I’m not creative’, ‘I’m not the type of person that can do…’, ‘I don’t have it in me’, ‘I can’t manage that’, ‘I’m not good enough’ etc. are all forms of rubbish we tell ourselves. I spoke about this in detail with a great friend of mine and accomplished TED talker Abria Joseph in a special episode of The Good People Effect podcast, if you’re interested, give it a listen! Yoga guru TED talker, Abria Joseph on removing negative self-talk and dreaming it real!
Noticing the critic is the first step towards overcoming head trash. Stopping the critic and replacing your inner dialog with positive thinking. It’s easier said than done but try writing down your negative thoughts in moments of negativity. Then cross out what you’ve written and replace it with a more positive thought or outlook. Remember, all experiences are neither good nor bad. It’s our perceptions of them that give us a hard time with coping and negative self-talk just adds to that problem.
Bonus link: Here’s a short and fairly cheap read that helped me through a hard time in my life and got me further along my own personal journey of discovering true inner happiness no matter how difficult the moments seemed to be: Zen and the art of happiness.
Too few resources
While not having the time, money, skills or tools to tackle our dream head on may be a reality for some, we can always find a way to move in the right direction. Sometimes it’s worth questioning ourselves to see what we can do with what we have on hand. Most the time the path reveals itself when we start moving forward in the direction that feels right. Don’t worry if you don’t have exactly what you need right now. Just start. Make a plan on how to acquire those resources and work with what’s at your disposal and you’ll be surprised at what you can achieve.
No realistic plan
The old saying goes, ‘If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.’ and I believe it to be true. How are you meant to know where you’re going without a map. Charlie talks about the “air-sandwich” which is the space between where you are and where you want to be. A lot of the time our work doesn’t add up to allow us to arrive where we want to be. Our hopes, dreams and desires are not possible if we don’t plan things out a little.
SMART goal setting is what will help get things clear. Make your plans specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-framed if you want to increase your chances of success. Once you know what you’re after, Charlie recommends breaking your goal into no more than 5 bite sized projects per period of work time. Start with your SMART goal in mind. Then work backwards to figure out the chunks that build up to that goal. Then break those chunks into tasks. Figure out at which stage of the project each task needs to be taken care of and map it all out on a piece of paper, a spreadsheet or some kind of planner.
If you enjoyed this post then please consider checking out Chalie Gilkey’s book Start Finishing: How to get from idea to done. Productive Flourishing (Charlie’s self-improvement podcast) will provide you with a more in-depth guide on moving through your projects with the style and grace of a productive ninja from start to completion and doing your life’s best work!
Now it’s time to take action!
This is the part where you tackle your most important projects head on and move forward with the things that matter most in your life. Getting started is usually the toughest part but once you’re moving, there’s no limit to what you can do!