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It’s interesting moving to a different organisation. Things that you have been taking for granted suddenly can’t be taken for granted anymore. Your frame of reference needs adjustment. Your weapons need sharpening or you need to learn a new style of fighting.

That’s why I guess many people dislike change. It’s uncomfortable. It’s bumpy. It’s inconvenient. Why make life harder for myself, if I can just cruise along, doing the thing that I’ve always been doing?

What’s important to recognise in these situations, is that change is the only constant, i.e., change will always happen, whether you like it or not. So don’t bother fighting the change, but learn how to deal with it. Like how some martial arts are all about using your enemy’s force, re-channeling it to defeat your enemy.

Change makes you re-frame and drives the need to re-centre. Those that do well despite constant changes are the strongest of them all. Because they know at first instance, how to move in ways that will derive the most benefit to self in any change situation.

Hence the need to be resilient.

However, understanding this and putting it into practice are two different things. And that’s why there’s a need for change management.

The biggest lesson that I’ve learnt so far, is that things are not going to be plain sailing, but if I can thrive despite of the bumps, I’ll be a stronger person from it. Like they say, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

To be honest, I’m quite affected by something that happened tonight. I believe that it’s because I took things for granted. I thought the situation was the same as before. But I was wrong. I guess one other thing I’ve learnt is that when you are in a safe environment, shielded by others, you can get weak. Not prepared for the slings and arrows that fly and are not blocked by the shields.

Well, nothing to do now but to pick myself up, learn from the incident, and move on. This incident has taught me in other ways, what I should not be as I progress in my life.

Good night.

This post is a little late, considering that it’s already the 10th 17th 18th day of 2010! It’s also very long… so please bear with me. If you don’t like to read so much, skip to the end.

2009 was a very hectic year for me – so many different things happened! Before I go into my thoughts on the year, let’s just do a recap of what happened.

Continue reading Looking Back at 2009

Thank God It’s Friday. I’m feeling a bit under the weather tonight, so at home resting after a nice dinner at Dunman Food Centre with Ai Lin.

This week was an interesting one in terms of working life. I had a new colleague join my branch on Monday – fresh grad from NUS. So this week has sort of been partly doing work, partly trying to welcome and mentor my new colleague.

This week was also the week for performance evaluation by the bosses. Still don’t know what the results are, and won’t know for a while, but this and the arrival of a new colleague brought on some deep thoughts about working life.

The more I work, the more I realise how important it is to know your objectives. I first came across this in 2006, when I went for my first reservist, which was a Basic Intelligence Officer Course. That was where I met CPT (now MAJ, I think) Edmund Yap. He is one funny fellow, but what he taught has stayed with me since that course:

“Always start with your intent. What is your intent? What is your objective? Focus on that first”

It seems as if it’s something really straightforward and easy to do, but in reality, it’s really hard to do. Sometimes in life, we catch ourselves doing something and ask ourselves, “why am I doing this?”. Usually, it’s in the case where you think you’re wasting your time doing something rather meaningless. Or in other cases, we spend so much effort trying to deal with exact details of how we’re doing stuff, that we forget the bigger picture.

I’m really guilty of this sometimes. I spend way to much time trying to figure out if a website button should be red or blue, instead of looking at the bigger issues and dealing with them.

Please don’t get me wrong. Details are important – meaning that there’s sometimes a need to pay attention to the details in order to get things right. It’s important then to decide which details are important, and which aren’t so important. I think this ability to discern only comes with experience.

Anyway, the intent and objective of any project is the key. You should always go back to the intent when making a major decision about the details. My ex-boss used to say, “Don’t spend too much time looking at the tree, until you can’t see the forest that it’s part of”.

Come to think of it, this post is actually about two things:

1) Being clear about your objective and always going back to this objective when faced with a decision. Don’t let the details determine what your objective is.

2) Don’t worry about the details unnecessarily if you still can achieve your objective. When you’re spending too much time on a decision on the details, stop and ask yourself, in the bigger scheme, is this important. If it is, how does the larger objective get affected by this detail. If it doesn’t affect the bigger scheme, decide and move on.

So knowing your objective and intent is important. Not just in projecs but in life. So what is/are your objective(s) in life? Bear this in mind and work the details to achieve them.