Are You In Your Desire Zone?

If you're leaving work at the end of the day feeling drained, unfulfilled or just blah, it might be time to consider if you are dong work in your desire zone.

In this live video, I'm going to discuss what the desire zone is, and how to improve your feelings about work in three practical steps.

I'm so excited to kick off November with you.

As some of you know, one of the things that I do is individual executive coaching. In several of my executive coaching sessions this week, a common theme has come up, and that's working in your Desire Zone.

The Desire Zone is something I learned about when I was trying to figure out how to be more productive, and how to reach my goals. I learned from Michael Hyatt & Co. that you could decide what's in your desire zone and learn to focus on that. By focusing on your desire zone, you'll actually get more work done because you'll stop procrastinating.

Today, I wanted to just talk to you a little bit more about the desire zone, and then give you three practical steps to spend more time at work in the desire zone.  This should reduce your stress, should reduce your anxiety, should make you more productive, and just a happier person in general, which I think is something that could benefit all of us.

So, what is the Desire Zone?   if you look at a graph, with Passion on one axis and Proficiency on the other, you can map out what your are high in passion and high in proficiency and that is your Desire Zone.  For proficiency, think about what you're proficient at, those things that you're good at, that you do well, that come easy to you.  Compare that to passion, which is the things that you're passionate about, something you really love to do, and want to spend a lot of time on.  You can actually take everything that you do and break it into one of four quadrants.

If you are very good at something and very passionate about
it, it will fit in your desire zone. This is where you want to spend most of your time in order to just really feel fulfilled, and like you're doing what you've been designed to do.

On the other hand, if you're spending a lot of time doing something you're not good at and something you're not passionate about, you're going to end up in a zone called Drudgery Zone. This is where work is going to feel a lot like work, it's going to feel really hard, it's going to make you unhappy, and you're going to find yourself stalling a lot. I mean, we all know what the word drudgery means, right? It's just awful.

There are a few other zones, not quite as important. But if you're really good at something but not passionate, that's called disinterest. You might find yourself working in a place where you're doing a task that you're not really interested in this is that area.

If you're really passionate about something, but not very good at it, then you find yourself in the distraction zone.  The distraction zone isn't all that bad.  Especially if you're really learning how to do a new skill, and you're moving your proficiency over into the desire zone.

What you really want to do is stay away from the drudgery zone.

You're probably thinking, how do we do that? How do we decide what we want to do? And how do we spend more time on the desire zone?

SORT

The first thing that you want to do is sort your activities.  I would go through your day and think about all the tasks that you do, either on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, depending on how your workload is, think about all the tasks that you do and really categorize them into one of these zones.

For me, when I was working back at the bank, if I was hosting a meeting with my staff that really fell in my desire zone.  I love to meet with my staff and get them excited about new ideas.

But, if I had to quality control a report and fact check it, that fill in my drudgery zone.  I am not good at that attention to detail, and that specific fact checking type of work.

When I was learning how to play the guitar that fell in distraction.  I really enjoyed doing it, I really wanted to learn how to do it, I just wasn't very good. And so, it took a lot of work for me to try to learn new things in that area.   

The first thing that you need to do is sort your workload into one of these four categories and really find what fits in your desire zone and what fits in your distraction and disinterest.

STOP

Step number two is to stop doing the things in your drudgery zone. We know sometimes that's easier said than done, how do you just stop doing something? But, if you work in a place where you can delegate, where you can workshare with other people, or where you can automate, or even just decide if it really needs to be done.

Everything in your drudgery zone, that makes you feel just awful, that you're not good at, you're not passionate about, those are the things that you need to stop.  

Either delegate to somebody else, stop doing completely because they don't need to be done, or find a way to automate it so that you don't have to spend as much time on it.  

SCHEDULE

The third step is to schedule. For those things that fall in your disinterest zone, and your distraction zone, you can't likely completely stop doing these. But you can schedule time so that you're really focused on the desire zone. This is the prioritization of how you want to spend your day.

By spending time in your desire zone, you will feel inspired, you will feel fulfilled, you will feel like you've gotten a lot of work done. When you do have to do things that fall on your disinterest or your distraction zones, you can add them to the list but make sure that you're balancing those and scheduling them to fit in between activities in your desire zone.

Desire zone is where you are passionate, where you are proficient and where you should be spending most of your time. If you're not, let's take a look at three steps.

1. Sort the activity you're doing into one of these four categories.

2.  Stop doing activities that fall in your drudgery zone, or your disinterest zone.

3.  Schedule those things in your distraction zone so that you're not totally distracted, and you're really prioritizing the things that are on your desire zone.

I hope that this video is helpful for you and that it gives you some ideas about how to reduce your stress at work, and how to be more fulfilled with the work that you're doing, more satisfied at the end of the day and happy about what you've achieved during the day.

If this is helpful, I want to encourage you to head over to www.Purawell.com/1 and check out another video I've created.  This video is the number one thing you need to do to up level your career. It's a really simple thing, it's free, and actually you probably already do it sometimes, you just haven't applied it in this way.

If you have some questions, I'm happy to answer them.  Drop a comment below.