Do The Things You Are Putting Off
Louise has worked as a Mechanic for 7 years, becoming a field service technician and representing Australia at the world skills competition for heavy vehicle mechanics. She decided to become the person she wished she had.
Do you have something you are putting off, something that when you think about it you get a yucky feeling and you want to forget about it. I am thinking about one of my clients in particular who is always behind on submitting their work evidence that goes along with the subjects they are doing in class.
In this particular situation it is compounding, if they don’t do it one month then next month they have to do it for two months and then if they miss it again then they have three months of it to do which then makes it feel even bigger and before you know it a year has gone by and now you need to get a years’ worth of work done in order to get your pay rise. We want to not get to this point! (some people in my class ended up being 3 years behind and had to pay to have their qualification extended in order to have the time to get everything together, sent in and assessed, we definitely don’t want to get to this point.)
On top of the annoyance that it causes this is also an energy drain that you may not notice. This is something in the coaching world we call an open loop. An unmade decision that is ticking around in our head, it may be conscious or unconscious, but it all adds up especially as an apprentice because our brain is already doing so much work to learn.
We want to close these loops as quick as we can! Lets talk about this on going decision to enter our work evidenced for three years. In this situation, there are three things I recommend trying depending on what your attention span is to do work like this, we want to work with ourselves. For my short attention span humans schedule in small chunks of time to do the work eg 15 minutes a week and for my longer attention span humans an hour a month. I would book these in either at the beginning or end of a work day to complete at work (if your workplace doesn’t give you time within your work hours get to work early or stay a little later).
I find if I say that if I say to myself “I’ll do it when I get home” I will not do it when I get home lol, something will distract me or I’ll start to relax and ill tell myself “I’ll do it tomorrow” then tomorrow never comes! Another benefit of doing it at work is that you can get information about jobs from a work computer/admin human/work mate if you need.
The third way is to do it on the run, have a list of jobs that you need to collect evidence for either on your phone or printed off in your tool box so you can refer to it easily, then you can either enter it on your break or while you are doing your job paperwork you do your work evidence.
Test and try which one works for you, that way you close the loop of “I need to get to my work evidence” and it doesn’t hold you back from getting a pay rise!
If you are an apprentice and you would like some help and guidance to make your apprenticeship easier please reach out to me at louise@louiseazzopardi.com, we can book in a coaching consultation!
Read more from Louise Azzopardi
Louise Azzopardi, Speaker, Mentor and Coach for Tradeswomen
Louise has worked as a Mechanic for 7 years, becoming a field service technician and representing Australia at the world skills competition for heavy vehicle mechanics. She decided to become the person she wished she had. Louise is a life coach for Tradeswomen, coaching through anxiety and sexism to become the most confident person they can be. She speaks on issues that matter to the Tradeswomen community but not only the issues but the solutions as well!
