Time to read: 3 minutes
Article at a glance:
- Your Three Circles shift over time as your life stage, skills, energy, and circumstances change.
- What made you helpful in one season may not be the best fit in another.
- Regular reflection helps you notice where you’re most helpful right now.
- Long-term contribution comes from adapting with awareness, not clinging to old roles.
One of the coolest (and potentially most challenging) things about your Three Circles is that they change.
After all, you change. You evolve and grow over time, and so will your contribution.
The needs of the company might change. The needs of your family will change (after all, you don’t parent a teenager the same way you parent a toddler!), and your circumstances will change.
Helpfulness can change with age. If your job is very physical, your most leveraged contribution might shift as your capacity changes.
You might grow your skills in an area or understand your wiring better and realize you’re more helpful somewhere else.
What fills your cup today might not fill it forever. Or tomorrow. You won’t be helpful long-term in an area that doesn’t fill your cup.
We see this at Redmond all the time, and it’s a great thing!
One of our associates who’s been here for decades used to spend most of his time on maintenance and in the rail yard. Over time, he shifted more to hosting mine tours and cooking for groups. Both were and are helpful, but his helpfulness changed because his life stage changed.
This happens when associates are hired for one task and later shift to another. One of our associates was hired for product photography and now works on curriculum development because that’s what we need right now.
Cool, right?
How to Adjust When Your Helpfulness Changes
What used to be helpful might not be anymore, and you might not be able to contribute in the same way for various reasons. That’s just part of life!
So, how do you ride these waves?
Reflection and Asking the Right Questions
The key to flowing through this is paying attention and regularly reflecting on your helpfulness, both on your own and with others.
Frequently reflect on questions like,
- Am I really helpful?
- How am I coming off to others?
- Where am I most helpful?
And when you ask those questions, don’t hold too tightly to the answers, because those answers will keep shifting. That’s why it’s important to keep asking!
How to Increase Your Helpfulness TODAY
How can you gauge your helpfulness right now? Like, today?
Think about these questions:
What do people currently ask for help with?
What’s right in front of you? What can you help with right now?
Where does your team value your help? According to them, what do you do well? (If you don’t know, ask them!)
The Bottom Line
In order to ride the waves of shifting helpfulness, it’s about wanting to actually BE helpful, not just look helpful or feel helpful.
It’s about paying attention
You know that your Three Circles aren’t static, and you’ll never “arrive,” but there are several reasons for that.
The key is to keep paying attention to what’s going on inside and around you, because those will all affect your helpfulness!
Keeping your eyes open is part of the process!
