Dont we all want to be happy?
Dont we all want to be successful and rich?
Dont we all want to be recognized & respected?
Dont we all want to have a wonderful life partner?
Dont we all want to have a beautiful home?
Dont we all want to have a healthy & safe life?


We all have thought on what we want, however the question here is how do we plan on achieving it?  Where do you start your quest to get happiness out of your life?  If you do not have a definite plan you will always be investing more on achieving one want over the other. If this happens you might either get a lot of success at work but you will not have real friends to go and celebrate it or you might get the right person, the love of our life but you will be struggling even keeping up the job that you already have.
Is there even a perfect life, where your career graph & personal life graph looks stable?  Or does it always have to be extreme?


If you are looking for change then it’s not too late to sit down and make a plan of action.
Where would you start making changes & how would you know where the problem starts in the maze of your life?


Here is how I found out mine.

We spend more time at work place out of 24 hours than we spend at home with our loved ones in a day.

Over the years I have realized that most of my complaints in life, most of the things I was wining about, most of the things that I was unhappy about, were directly or indirectly related to my job. Time, Money, job satisfaction, relationships etc.

The common complaint was there is no Job satisfaction

Employee satisfaction / job satisfaction is not just a feedback form. It’s one of the most important factors that leads to the growth and development of the business. On a personal note it is a feeling that gives you a sense of security and happiness about your job. To test that you can get a series of data of at least last three employee satisfaction surveys of your company & compare them with the series of data of the employee performance within the same time range, you will see the direct relation between the two. If one decreases the other also decreases. They say even god cannot control free will. To love what you do for living is also a matter of free will. No employee welfare program can be good enough for you unless you want to feel good about it.  Till what extent can an employer go to drive loyalty in employees, to make them love their job so that they can be more productive and deliver good results?   Employee satisfaction it requires efforts both from the employer and the employee to work towards achieving the common goal of welfare.

TIME FACTOR:

When I first started working, I had a job were my process schedule was 24*7 365 days a year. Which included shift patterns at odd hours, split work offs etc... That’s how most of the call centres work in Mumbai. You absolutely have no life of your own. When you’re wide awake, the people in your side of the world are sleeping while you are busy assisting billing & payment issues of the people on the other side of the world. I could not spend time with family due to the rotating shifts.  Eating patterns had already changed abnormally.  There was just eat all you can throughout your shift till you figure out whether that was your lunch for that day or dinner.

Assuming a 9 to 5 job would give me not only a promising schedule for lunch & dinner but also a chance to resolve the challenge of the time factor, I accepted an opportunity in a corporate firm.  This led to a drastic increase in my travel time firstly due to the location of my new office and secondly due to the traffic during the peak hours. I was flooded with mails every morning at work. I had to speak to a lot of people from different parts of the world to get my job done and apart from meeting strict deadlines to survive with the cut throat competition in the market; even 24 hours of the day were less to fulfil the desired requirement.  I would come home with loads of office work and a list of calls to clients to be made. My weekends usually were spent in preparing my agenda for next week, calling and confirming the appointments for next week and so on.


HOW TO OVERCOME THIS ?


Channel your thought process


So you could have a corporate 9 to 5 job that you are complaining about, or you could be a retail sales champion or a call centre employee who hardly gets away from work during the weekend. Irrespective of your profession, you will not get inner peace and a stress free environment until you bridge the GAP of time factor in your life.  Thinking about personal plans or issues at work or coming home and thinking about work related plans or issues makes no sense.  It will not only hamper your productivity at work but also make your personal life miserable. If you want to develop an eye for detail, create some discipline in your thought process.

The moment you enter your office door, program your mind to freeze all thoughts like the when and where will you go out on a date, how you’re going to deal with your in laws un planned home visit, when are you going to buy your own house, when are you going to have children, how soon are you planning on your next holiday trip with your friends.  Etc

Similarly the moment you enter your home, forget about what happened at work today and stop worrying about what’s going to happen during tomorrow’s monthly meeting with your boss. When you having dinner and watching Television with the love of your life, complaining about you not getting a raise or your boss not giving you enough credit for your performance or the company not recognizing & appreciating your hard work is worthless. Neither it will change your working conditions, nor will it do well on your personal relationships.  Even after having a bad day at work, imagine how beautiful your evening would be with your loved one, when you just sit and talk about how lucky you are to have each other or how bless you are to have a wonderful house together, instead of wining & repeating the same negative things that made you unhappy at work.


 Communication

• Some people use two phones one for business and one for personal calls in an attempt to work- life balance.
• However what’s the point? When you still carry your business phone with you on a family dinner party and excuse yourself the moment your boss calls you? It certainly defeats the purpose. It is still interrupting your personal life anyway.
• For the kind of clumsy person that I become at times, having one cell phone itself becomes too much to handle. 
• It’s impossible at times to respond to every message, call or email on my constantly beeping blackberry. 
•  So while we are constantly on a run around trying to meet strict deadlines I have made a simple 1 phone policy.
•  I try my best not to answer personal calls during working hours.  
•   Similarly whenever I get calls after working hours I arrange a call back with them for the next working day. 
• Again I don’t need to tell them to stop calling me, the message is politely conveyed which will lead to receiving such calls only during business hours.