Posted by Dave Lorenzo - Business Coach

In every aspect of your career, strive to achieve a winning balance between the rational and emotional. A life without passion is hardly worth the living, and one without an organized framework that allows your passions to thrive is, more often than not, chaos. Below are some examples of ways in which achieving this balance amplifies your success:

Work: Most of us spend at least 40 hours a week doing our job. If your heart’s not in it, that amounts to an awfully large percentage of your time spent simply meeting an obligation. When you’re excited about your work, you naturally perform better, invest more energy, and achieve more. Ask yourself if your job makes sense practically and provides you with some sort of emotional fulfillment—pride, accomplishment, energy, excitement. Maybe your job pays very well but means nothing to you. Perhaps you’re doing work you love but struggling to get ahead financially. Whatever you love to do, there is a way to do it and make a good living at it. Don’t settle for anything less. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for your customers.

Relationships: Most relationships that are fueled primarily by an intellectual or professional connection can benefit from a touch of the personal. Business partners are more likely to consider you for opportunities that open up if they have some degree of friendly attachment to you beyond professional. Fostering this sort of connection is easy. Invite a colleague out to lunch, or simply chat with him during downtime. On the flip side, good friends are an often untapped resource for professional development. Talk to your friends about your career and goals, and see if they have any leads.

Personal Brand: In defining yourself and marketing your services to clients, give attention both to the rational and emotional appeal of your offering. Your product or service has to make sense from a rational perspective, but it also needs to appeal to the client in an emotional way. What value can you add to the client’s life? How will your work add inspiration or positive energy? Your personal brand promise should encompass your tangible, on-paper strengths as well as the more intangible, emotional benefits.

Goals: You’ve got to make your goals exciting and fun to accomplish. If you don’t, you’re never going to stick with them. You can either think of ways to make the actual process of goal attainment emotionally rewarding, or you can think about the emotional rewards to you when the goal is reached. For instance, if you’ve set the goal of negotiating for higher pay in your next performance evaluation, you can focus on the excitement created by challenging yourself to do something new, or the sense of accomplishment you will feel once you succeed. Better yet, infuse the entire process with thoughts of these emotional rewards. Any undertaking will benefit from an investment of energy and passion.

Buzz: In getting the word out to repeaters and boosters about you, give them something to grab onto in the rational and the emotional sense. What do you offer, and how does it affect the client or make her feel? Anytime a new product or service is hyped, both the hard and soft benefits are outlined. The same must be true for you. You want people talking about the great job you do, as well as the panache with which you do it.

Filed under: Career Intensity Challenge
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