I am currently on my last day of vacation. It’s been largely a “staycation” with a couple of quickie trips out of town thrown in for good measure. I’ve been using the time to get caught up on spring cleaning (I know it’s late) and generally organizing my personal life and improving my mental health status.
I’m reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink, and it’s got me thinking about a lot of things. A lot of today’s hot business/work life books encourage us to step outside of our comfort zones (Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week comes to mind). A Whole New Mind takes a unique approach in making the case that right-brained aptitudes and abilities are going to be among the attributes that will help workers achieve success in the workplace of the future. I have always thought of myself as foremost a left-brained thinker but I have also become aware that I am a much happier person when I pay attention to right-brained thinking. I also believe it makes me a better contributer to work and personal relationships. Right-brained thinking, as Pink defines it, is all about patterns, style, empathy, synthesis and holistic thinking, as opposed to logic, detail and language which are attributed to the left brain.
Yesterday I mowed my lawn. Not a terribly exciting chore normally, but I had a bit of a revelation this time round. Perhaps I had Pink’s book for inspiration, but for some reason I decided to mow a different pattern than the one I had always used. I simply mowed diagonally rather than the usual straight up and down:
What’s so exciting about this? Well not much on the surface. I don’t think it saved me much time or effort. But it did make the activity a little more joyful than usual and it didn’t feel like it took as much effort. And I enjoyed the artistic effect; enough that I was inspired to snap this picture with my iPhone.
What I’ve taken from this is that it’s really important to change things up from time to time and approach things from a different angle. The next time I find myself in the doldrums at work without much inspiration, I will challenge myself to do things differently; to break out of my comfort zone. The worst that could happen is I fail, learn from my mistakes, and move on. But there’s also a pretty decent chance I’ll end up inspired and motivated to see things and act on things in a different way. And that’ll take me closer to where I want to be – a more content person with more to contribute to the world and the people around me.