Before you run for the door, mine the gold.
The Partnership make it compulsory to be in the office 4 days a week. You’re furious.
So you refuse. You push back. You vehemently defend the old way of working. And when that doesn’t work, you look for the door.
Never mind that you’ve spent the last year working towards a promotion.
Never mind that you’re only 2 months away from the decision.
Never mind that the head of the group has vocally reaffirmed their commitment to promoting you in the immediate future.
Still, you reach for the door.
It’s totally understandable. When you’ve become used to working flexibly and in-person working is made compulsory, it’s normal to want to protest and push back.
But before you reach for your list of recruiters, mine the gold.
Mining the gold is a tool I teach inside Be The First for extracting value from challenges, failures and when things don’t go as you want them to – so you always come out on top.
This value comes in many forms –
A lesson learned.
A new opportunity.
Deeper knowledge or experience you can apply else where.
The reason it’s so powerful is it keeps you in ownership. It’s how you turn things that happen to you into things that happen for you.
When I coached a Be The First client to mine the gold in this scenario, the transformation was immediate: her energy changed (goodbye deep frown, confrontational tone, agitated mannerisms) and her whole perspective shifted.
Mining the gold revealed an opportunity she’d been too angry to see before –
With 2 months to go before the decision to promote her, she discovered 3 valuable opportunities:
- To use the time in the office to double her efforts to bring her billings on target (critical to her promotion)
- To demonstrate a mature understanding of how the needs of the business drive firm strategy
- To leverage her extensive network for opportunities to bring in work to support those business needs
Not only did mining the gold make it easier to accept the decree from above, it gave her opportunities to showcase her value that strengthened her prospects for promotion.
So the next time things don’t go the way you want them to, before you reach for the door, mine the gold.
