How do you want people to remember you by? I attended a celebration of life recently, and it made me think about three things you want people to say about you... My thoughts are gathered in last week's blog. It's RIGHT HERE if you missed it.

This week, let's talk business. Have you ever hired a manager based on their perfect answers during the interview process, only to discover after three months, at their review time, that they were not a good match for the position after all? Or they're not a good match for the team? Have you ever started working at a job that you loved at first sight, only to dread Monday mornings down the road? It's crazy. Why do people leave their job? Why do people get let go shortly after getting hired? Keep reading or watch the following video for more...

On the very first day, everybody starts their new job and wants to be liked by their boss and their coworkers. Weirdly, fast-forward to the 91st day, and they're not even sure THEY like THEM! Isn't that weird? What is going on?

What happened during that time? It's about how you respond to situations or to change or to direction. How you respond to the type of work that you are doing. Very often, we look at job descriptions without thinking of our own internal drivers, because very often, we actually don't know what our internal drivers are! We don't know ourselves very well, and it's not easy to prevent these situations from happening. And once they've happened, we are not sure how to avoid for them to happen again, or how to fix it. How can you prevent it? Why is it happening? What are the tools that you can use to rectify things when situations like these arise?

This is a three-part series, and today, we will be talking about why people leave their job. Then, next week, we will go into part two, into understanding what are these internal drivers and what drives us. You will learn more about the details of a few of these drivers. There are over 60 of them that are recognized, but I will go in depth about maybe about half a dozen of them. Finally, in part number three, I will give you three different tools that can be utilized to prevent, to identify and to rectify if these situations happen either in the current position that you are in, or in your organization.

So why do people leave their job? At the very beginning of the process, you are hiring people. And what happens with this process is that firstly, it is very expensive, right? You spend thousands of dollars in recruitment fees. You try to find the right candidates and then you downsize from a hundred different applicants to maybe three. Nowadays, you may not have any applicants at all, and you have to really dig through and maybe even use a recruitment agency's services. Then, once you have downsized the list, you go into the interview process, and you might even do multiple interviews as well. Finally, you make a choice. How do you know you've made the right choice? Because when you're interviewing somebody, they will be at their best behavior. And very often, they will have rehearsed the answers that they are giving you, and they will be perfectly prepared to tell you exactly what you want to hear. They are not necessarily lying, but they are making things maybe a lot nicer than they really are, or they are just making up something because they're not really aware of their own internal drivers. They're not really aware of the different dynamics that you already have within the organization.

The reason why people leave their job is very often connected to their meta programs or what I was referring to as internal drivers. They are the things that drive us, the thoughts that help us make decisions, and they affect different other systems in our brain. It was once thought that our meta programs could not be changed, that they were hardwired features and they would vary from one person to another, so different brain, different meta program. But some research by Robert Dilts led to discover that meta programs could be modified or nuanced. So I will tell you more about this in part number three of the series, on how to rectify and how to change them, but let's talk a little bit more about what they are.

When we talk about meta programs, we're talking about mental shortcuts. You may be familiar with some people being "big picture" and some people being "detail oriented", for example. Some people like to work alone. Some people like to work in team. Some people like change. Some people don't like change. Some people are better in a leadership position. Some are better middle managers; some are better as part of the team.

There are different meta programs that are very distinctive to everybody's mind, and these mental shortcuts are directing our decisions, our behaviors, our actions, our interactions with others. These are the systems that we have inside our brain that control other mental processes at a higher level. They control our thoughts, our emotions and all that. So the reason why people leave their job is because maybe they were hired for a very detail oriented task while they are more of a big picture kind of person, or maybe they were hired to be a middle manager, but they don't like to have somebody above them. They would be better in a higher position where they can do whatever they want without having to report to somebody else. Or maybe it's the opposite. They are hired in a leadership position, but they need feedback. They need to have somebody above them. Or they're hired to work inside a community, but they have to work alone at home, and they don't like that.

There are lots of different things that will affect the enjoyment of our job, and that's why we will leave. Obviously, there are numbers of other reasons why people leave their job, but I'm talking about specifically, why are people not wanting to get up in the morning and not wanting to go do what they are paid to be doing? The meta program world is real and very relevant to explain lots of differences within organizations. It is something that is very underused, and you'll learn about these drivers next week, in part two.

See you next time!

TIRED OF NOT GETTING ALONG WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE IN YOUR PERSONAL OR PROFESSIONAL LIFE? 

People don't leave their job. They leave the co-worker they can't stand, or the boss they don't respect. Get to know the four types of people around you with the FREE THINK Yourself® A RELATIONSHIPS PRO Daily Reference Guide.

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