Weekly 12 - Can ChatGPT help you find your why?

Three days off sick was not on the plan, but it turns out sometimes the worst weeks plant the best seeds. During that quiet time, I find myself asking, why am I actually doing this? Follow along on the 12th petals weekly as we explore finding my why. So welcome back to the Petals weeklies with me, Si Jobling. This is the 12th one of the season. Before we get into all the needs, let's do some of those scores. Productivity is 3, enjoyment 2, teamwork is 3, learning is 4 and serenity is 4, bringing out an average of 3.2, which is slightly down on last week. So naturally, productivity wasn't as good as I wanted to be based on we just talked about, which really impacted my enjoyment. But ironically, my serenity was up because I wasn't doing much and I was relaxing, which my body clearly needed and my mind. And fundamentally I was learning a bit more than I would normally because I had that quiet time. So there you go. Petal scores are on a par with previous weeks, but obviously some of those factors are flashing around a bit at the moment. We are still in Q1 just about and we're getting very close to the end of my quarterly milestone. But last week a few curveballs hit me. Literally. I started off pretty strong, not gonna lie, I was pretty confident that I was gonna hit some of these goals. Maybe not all of them, but some of them I cracked on with some of the redesigns that I had planned around the full flow for creating a snapshot, editing the snapshot, providing the scores and looking at the scores with the team. I made probably 30, 40% progress on that. Just an arbitrary number, but it wasn't quite halfway but. But I felt like I was making some good progress with room to move at the weekend. But unfortunately my body said no, you're not going to do that. So I had to just listen to the modificate my body and slow down and recoup. So yeah, it happens. We know you set out plans and they don't always go as you want them to. So I get myself, my body recover and then come Sunday morning when I was starting to feel a little bit better, I went outside, went for a walk with a dog in the glorious weather and started listening to a few things just to get my head back in the game. I'll talk about it a little bit later on, but one of the really interesting books was revisiting Simon Sinek's Find My why and I'll explain what I did shortly in an outtake just to give you the full context. I did push Myself a little bit last week as well. I knew I was probably pushing myself from a commitment perspective. I had a few other commitments that weren't to do with petals that I hadn't factored in properly, which did push me back a little bit as well. I, um. But I do still believe that setting yourself some realistic and stretched goals always give you that room for manoeuvre. When I do my weekly goals, I've been doing this with the on the side community for years now. Every Monday morning I will note down what my goals are for the week, give myself two or three to work towards some health related. But normally it's side project related. So it just gives me a bit of structure to focus on those three areas and I do realize that eventually it's too much. Bring it back to one, maybe two at a push. I need to be better to myself. I need to really think about what I can achieve and give myself the, my body and mind the space to think about this stuff properly. As you can probably tell, I don't sound myself this week. I probably don't look myself. I'll get back there eventually. It's fine. We still haven't got a chance to get together as a team either. Everyone else has got their own commitments. But I think we finally booked something in for the coming Friday. This will be our pre release review of all the work we've done so far. So I will be chipping away at those designs this week, see where we get to and work out what the final steps will be. Because I don't think we'll be ready to go live this weekend or next week. But we will definitely work out what is remaining and give ourselves some flexibility to get that ready for when it's good to go live. I'm all for setting timelines. I'm not a big fan of deadlines, even the language of deadline. Who's dying in this process? Probably me because I'm pushing it too hard. But point being, it's a goal date I'm working towards and the kind of flexibility around this, this is for fun and side projects, mate. It's not a real end of the world project that must go live. So as I mentioned at the start, amongst all that downtime, I did have the chance to reflect and do a little bit of listening and reading. I revisited Simon Sinek's Finding My why Now. If you're not familiar with this, I highly recommend you go and catch up on it. It is a most inspiring person and actually that taps into a little bit of his why. It all comes down to a very simple concept of what do you do, why do you do it and how do you do it and fundamentally why do you do it is right at the center of everything you decide. So what I did, I decided to use ChatGPT and see if it could help me find my why. Let me talk about that process because.

I'm out and about, no one to talk to. I thought I'd have a chat with Chat GPT to see what she could. Well, they would think would be my why. I asked can you help me find my why? And they came back with a couple of good questions around purpose, passions and stuff like that. So because I do this verbally as well. I love, I love that feature in Chat GPT if you can just have a conversation with it, it's really quite handy, especially when you're necessarily wanting to type things down. But anyway, the conversation was quite interesting. I talked about some of my pasts, passions, my success stories that I'm pretty proud of. A lot of it is around the community. Not going to be honest. I'm going to be honest goes back to the multipack in the noughties, our Birmingham based creative community on the side during lockdown, another online community for side project funds and then how I do this at work as well. So the why we came up with was connecting people to grow together, which I think aligns really well with petals. As to why I do it, I like to connect people so they can grow together and the petals framework is a one way of doing that in a workplace.

So since I've done that exercise, I've been refining it a little bit just to kind of change the language a little bit. And I've come down to creating spaces where people feel safe, seen and supported to thrive and grow. It's probably a little bit wordy at the moment. I need to make it a bit more succinct. Gen AI maybe. But I feel like I found why I do all these things, even providing this content. I like to share, bring people together and hopefully grow in the process. But there's my action to you. My takeaway is do you know why you do what you do? And if not, why not try using tools like ChatGPT or Claude Copilot, whichever is your preference, and ask those questions and find out why you do what you do and where you get your passions from.

I've just been listening to another blink by Laura van Der Klam called 168 Hours Now. I was curious. So tell me, how do we maximize our awareness weeks. I mean I talked a lot about this recently, right. I was curious what, what her thoughts were. There's some still some interesting takeaways from there. I think from a professional perspective you can't, you can leave a meeting where you feel that you're bringing no value. I think that gets a lot easier in a digital society. When many meetings are held online, you can easily just raise your hand or leave a comment. I've done it quite a few times recently. I've been in meetings where I was curious. I was invited out of interest potentially, or consultants. But as he went on I was like, I don't need to be here. This is the wrong context. So I've just politely said thanks for the invite. I don't think I've got any value to bring to this conversation but I'll catch up with the other participants after, just in case. And that reclaims the half an hour as long as you're polite about it and you explain why and there are suitable people in the conversation. Crack on. I recently organised another meeting was with pretty much every single member of the membership management in our department because I was trying to again economise on duplication of meetings. We have multiple department wide meetings on a monthly basis and I felt like we could be more efficient. So it was a very interesting conversation. It was. Kept it half an hour just in case it didn't need to go on. Posed the question in the meeting title. Everyone arrived, most people knew what was going on. It got a little bit difficult at points because it went off topic. But again I was like, I was conscious. This is an expensive meeting. It does not need to be an hour. Half an hour should be enough and if not we'll rearrange a follow up. And guess what? We need a follow up. But it raises a lot of interesting questions. And when I asked the sample group afterwards, did you find that useful? Everyone was like, oh yeah. Anyway, this is where I'm bringing it back to Petals and productivity and 168 hours principle. You do have a limited amount of time to use in a week or fortnight or a month. It's okay to say no to meetings and you really need to be more intentional about how you use your time. I'm back to 168 hours. Think about where your core competences are, where you should focus your time and where others could probably do a better job. That's what I'm going to be doing this week.

So that's it for this week. Main takeaway. I guess is even during those rough weeks when everything's hitting you and nothing's going to plan, you can still find something to get out of it. And for me, it was going back to my roots, working out why I do what I do. I'd highly recommend you explore this yourself, either through generative AI or other means, but really have a think about why you do what you do. And again with your team, why you do what you do. This is a really cool exercise to do. We've got our team catch up this coming Friday to get ready for the launch, and I'm hoping next week we'll have something to share with you all. In the meantime, look after yourselves and your freight teammates and continue the petals conversations with all those around you. See you next week.