Don’t lose sight of how you feel
“What do you do?” is the classic question we ask strangers but it’s the wrong one to ask ourselves.
We must stop thinking of ourselves in the same way as a machine. Computers can keep logs of the tasks they’ve completed and have list of what tasks they have to go. They don’t have feelings or emotions so this forms the basis of their purpose. Yet we aren’t machines.
We’ve got moods, hormones, and doubts. Some days we feel like crap and I don’t know why. If I force myself to act the same way all the time, I’m fighting my own biology and you can guess usually wins.
Randy Wolken has had an incredibly successful career by most people’s measures. He’s the President of the Manufacturing Association of Central New York and it’s his role to help the companies he represents to compete in the global market. Combined they employ over 50,000 people!
His schedule is often packed with meetings and he rarely gets a moment to think in the working day. But he makes sure he makes the time to check in on his emotions to keep his mind and life in balance. If part of you feel lost or empty, you can do the same to bring your true self to the forefront.
This article is based on the Mindful & Driven episode with Randy. You can listen here or find the YouTube video at the bottom of this article.
Who am I? Who do I want to be?
Keeping up with the world is exhausting. It’s moving faster than it’s ever moved before in human history. If you try to keep on top of too many trends, you’ll be left overwhelmed.
My previous career was in technology consulting. No matter how well I understood the software I worked with, there was always a new update around the corner. The side skills of other platforms I needed to know expanded at an exponential rate. Staying still meant falling behind.
Randy is almost double my age and finds working with technology naturally harder. To record our podcast together, I had to help him on the technology side for nearly an hour. He tries his best but knows he must focus elsewhere.
He asks himself every day “Who am I?”. It’s his method of mediation to listen to his thoughts and analyzes any doubts which pop into his head. Be careful of becoming so obsessed with learning about the world outside your mind that you neglect the world inside.
Be open about your pain
There’s no contest when it comes to Randy choosing the toughest period of his life. His daughter was seriously ill in her youth and it crushed him.
In most other problems in his life, he would throw himself into finding a solution. He would look at all the numbers and get in all the experts. Yet she was already in the hands of capable doctors. There was nothing he could do to help someone he loved so deeply and it tore him apart.
Out of necessity, he turned to his friends and family for support to process his emotions. Unsurprisingly, it made the pain far more bearable. His daughter is now a happy and healthy 24-year-old but the lesson of being open about his pain stuck with him forever.
I don’t believe there are “strong” people and “weak” people. Our mental strength fluctuates throughout our lives and just because you feel weak now, it doesn’t mean you can’t be strong in the future. Never feel ashamed for acting in a way you consider weak. We all need help sometimes. It’s human.
People remember how you made them feel
A mistake Randy made earlier in his career was doing things for people in the hope they’d like him and they could build a relationship. Yet this isn’t how people work. They remember how you made them feel not what you did for them.
Before the camera started rolling, I talked with Randy about struggles in his personal life. I appreciate him as a fellow human being and I’m certainly not only interested in his job title. There’s no hack to this though.
If you care about people then you’ll show it in the way you act with them. It can’t be faked and it’s insulting to try. If you ask someone how they are then you better be prepared for if they give the real answer otherwise don’t ask.
You can’t do this with everyone of course as we don’t have enough energy each day. Yet you can choose to treat people with respect once you have their time. They’ll be grateful and your life will be enhanced by sowing the seed of a meaningful relationship.
I hope you found these tips useful and can see ways you can apply them to your own life. If you’d like to hear Randy talk about it with me in more detail, check out our conversation in the video below.
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