The call to do our work heartily or “wholeheartedly,” as some translations read, means being engaged with our mind, will and emotions. This post focuses on the first of this soulish triad: how to fully engage our work with our mind.
The big picture mentally
Jehoshaphat instructed his judges to “[c]onsider what you are doing . . . . “ This was a call to arouse awareness in their minds as to the circumstances of their undertaking. It was also a reminder of for Whom they would be working. 2 Chronicles 19:6.
We can’t very well do our work for God (2 Chronicles 19:6; Colossians 3:23) if we don’t start by mentally directing our work in His direction. Consequently, I always try to remember to start my work with quick prayer where I acknowledge the Lord and seek His help.
Fully focused
After acknowledging the Lord, engaging one’s mind in one’s work means being fully focused on the task at hand. It means thinking about the task rather than daydreaming about where we would rather be or what we would rather be doing. This should go without saying, but it’s often done without thinking.
We let our mind wonder to what we are doing that evening or our upcoming vacation rather than the task before us. Whether the motive is to avoid boredom or stress or to pass time, a lack of focus compromises even the must mundane work.
When I was in high school I worked at a country club. My job was to get members’ golf clubs out of their storage locker when they arrived and to clean the clubs before putting them back in storage when they finished.
I was thrilled when I first got the job because I loved golf, and thought working at the country club would be the best of jobs. However, I soon grew bored of the job. I found myself daydreaming about what I would do when I got off work, and my shifts seemed to drag on forever. I had completely disengaged my mind from my job, thinking mental engagement was not necessary to do my job.
However, when I finally stopped daydreaming and focused on the work, my job suddenly got more interesting, and my shifts went by faster. I had mentally engaged my work.
Even seemingly mundane, repetitive work, requires some mental engagement. When we divide or divert that engagement, the quality of our work suffers. Our work suffers because we sacrifice what our full attention could bring to our job. One thing we sacrifice is thoroughness.
Thinking thoroughly
Being thorough means thinking through all possibilities and the task at hand to make sure you haven’t missed anything. Thoroughness is driven by one’s will but carried out in one’s the mind.
I have the benefit of working around a lot of smart people. I work in a large law firm, and the attorneys I supervise are top of their class law school graduates. They’ve been rewarded their whole life for their smarts, and they know they are smart. But one of the first things I tell them is, “Be thorough before you are smart.”
If they miss a deadline or an important document in document review, nobody is going to care how smart they are. These are baseline things in the practice of law. As difficult intellectually as some parts of practicing law are, being thorough has everything to do with diligence and almost nothing to do with intelligence.
This is true of most jobs. There is a baseline of things that must be done, and much of it is achieved by going through a mental checklist of task learned by experience or training.
“Excellence, inspiration, and innovation, hide in the crevasses of thoroughness.”
What has been counterintuitive for me is recognizing that some of my best ideas at work have come while simply being thorough. As I go mentally through the list of what must be done, ideas and strategies spring up like flowers in a desert. Indeed, excellence, inspiration, and innovation hide in the crevasses of thoroughness. Thoroughness, however, does not exist apart from mental engagement.
Thinking strategically
When I was in college I worked as a waiter at an upscale seafood restaurant. I had never waited tables before and found it more difficult than expected. It was not a job one could do without full mental engagement. There was simply no way to manage four to six tables, keep orders straight, and get them out on time without being fully engaged mentally. As a result, when we were busy, time would fly. But it is one thing to be mentally focused and quite another to think strategically about one’s work.
After I had worked at the restaurant for a while, the general manager decided to institute a sales contest for the servers on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. I am naturally competitive, and this got my competitive juices flowing. More importantly, it got me thinking strategically about my job.
It occurred to me that alcoholic drinks could increase a tab by more than 100%. As I thought more about it, I realized most people did not order desert, but many who didn’t could be easily persuaded. So, I began to push drinks before dinner and deserts after dinner. And you know what? It worked. I began winning the sales contest, night after night.
I’m not naturally a salesperson, but I took the time to think strategically about how to do what I was doing better, and that is all it took to give me an edge over my coworkers who, like most, were just punching a clock. Being engaged mentally means thinking strategically about why we do what we do and how to do it better.
Focused, thorough, and strategic
Now, here is the really encouraging thing about all this talk about mental engagement: it has very little to do with raw smarts. Mensas have no advantage over C students. Anyone can be focused and thorough.
Similarly, being strategic doesn’t have as much to do with intelligence as it does with experience. Experience is the fruit of having done or studied something enough to know how things play out in certain situations and to make plans in light of those potentialities.
Between humans, the mind is not an even playing field. Some people are smarter than others, and some people are considerably smarter than the rest of us. Fortunately, in most work what matters with regard to mental engagement is available to almost all of us.
All the more reason to take advantage of it and to work fully engaged with our mind. GS
