Seeking Fulfillment: Acknowledgement, Engagement, and Preciousness

I've spoken many times about dealing with personal stress and unforeseen circumstances in and out of the workplace, dealing with them while in the presence of others, while you're by yourself, and in many other scenarios. Two days ago I got the opportunity to sit down and listen to a few of my peers talk about some of the things that were weighing on their mind like ongoing illnesses, emotional distress or having to leave family and children nearly every day to do what they loved to do for a living; despite all of these difficulties. Our initial exchange dealt with these and also being able to identify the real motivation behind their actions. In doing so and detailing our perspectives, I learned that many of them, if not all, had a misconception about the power of acknowledgement.

The first step in my process was to examine past performance in order to be able to better understand my present situation. Once I could see and grasp what hasn’t worked and what did, I was able to begin the process of acknowledging and making the changes necessary to my perception, expectations and goals in reality. Many of my personal disappointments came from acknowledgement without understanding. For example, I might get stuck dealing with a difficult person one day and simply be “okay” with that observation. I could accept it and move on, which is one solution. Most wouldn’t care to or need to know why. In my journey, I found I’m the type of person that likes to have a deeper understanding of the motive behind action. Not to fix it or alter it but just to fully grasp it; lessening its effects on me. Even if I was unsuccessful in finding out the “why” behind a particular behavior in someone or particular situation, that didn’t impact my overall sense of fulfillment in the moment. What I found was that not trying to see beyond acceptance was far more damaging to the core of what made me who I was. I often heard that it wasn’t really up to me to find why things happened the way they did, but following that didn’t work out for me very well. It did the opposite of what I hoped to accomplish. The key here is to see that acceptance of reality is one part of the process, but the reasoning that follows is just as important.

One other piece of the puzzle is that the reasoning behind your acknowledgement has to stem from the correct set of questions to get the right answers. A mistake I made when I was barely beginning to grasp my own concept, was that I was always asking why things were happening to me. A slight change in perspective drastically changed my results when I began to ask instead why things are happening for me. This might be why many of the people I’ve met choose not to even bother with figuring out why someone is behaving a certain way and it makes sense. But changing the end goal and changing the approach gave me a better understanding of how acknowledgement could be applied more effectively. Now being able to accept and comprehend the situation I could look into the next step: Engagement.

Engagement is the easiest as it’s just taking action. Just as with acknowledgment, there are different aspects of engagement. Should I engage at all? How should I go about it? How long do I engage for if I choose to do so? Many questions should arise from the idea of tackling the situation at hand. Most opt for the easy road: An emotional reaction. Guilty as charged; as we all can lose sight from time to time. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to strive for the better approach as many times as I could by breaking down the scenario and the responses I got. Just as with acknowledgement, pay close attention to the results of your engagements and what they will yield rather than the source of them. It’s not why you do it but why you did it for. Think this thoroughly. A helping thought on engagement for me was to be able to differentiate between action and reaction.

The last, and quite possibly my favorite step is preciousness. To find greater value where most find absolutely nothing.

Sharing this with my peers that night, I spoke about a friend of mine whom I served with in the military. I was barely turning 25 that year and I was more high-speed than most; caring little to anything at all about everything. I recall one of our conversations vividly since he mentioned him having his first child. As a blood-drunk, drunken in general, young adult with a rifle in my hand and seemingly nothing to lose, I thought nothing of this until he made the comment that I should slow down and really take the time to admire the life around me. Sincerely, I busted out in laughter inside our armored truck. Five years later, it makes perfect sense. Beyond failure, sorrow, disappointment and sadness, you must see beauty in the details. The secret is to find those little things inside yourself rather than try to find them elsewhere. You will see them elsewhere from time to time and it’s very pleasant, even serendipitous, when that happens. But outside pleasure isn’t constant. The only constant comes from within. Through a consistent, self-aware and accepting nature you just might be able to find your own fulfillment. Easier said than done, but not impossible. Another thought process added to the arsenal. Hopefully you found this useful. Any feedback is welcome via social media or via email at [email protected].