GUNG HO!: REVITALIZING THE DEPED BALANGA DIVISION TEAM

Post date: Mar 12, 2014 6:58:25 AM

By: Maila M. Capulong

What drives you to work every single day? What keeps you fiercely motivated and ferociously dedicated to your job as a member of the DepEd Division Office team? What thoughts wake you up in the middle of the night that spur you to work and realize your dreams?

For many people, work may have become a drag, a cacophony of boring routine activities that have lost their significance. Work has ceased to be a source of joy. It has even seemed to become a proverbial bitter pill that one had to swallow in order to survive. Life in general has become an iterative cycle of waking up, preparing for work, travelling to office, performing a series of tasks that are either enjoyed or abhorred. At day’s end, someone feels the total exhaustion, drain, and stress wrought by the incessant pounding of demands that stretch your limits as a human being. And the wheel of life turns again. And again. . .

Someone once said: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” It is really a matter of attitude. If you are able to change the inner attitude of your mind, your life can change for the better. That is the essence of a Gung Ho spirit: one that leads you to reevaluate your priorities, your motivations and your sense of meaning. It is the essence of GUNG HO that can revitalize and redirect the human spirit by revolutionizing your attitude.

Kenneth Blanchard says that for work to become meaningful, it has to be understood as important. For, as he says, work is important because we make the world a better place: it helps the individual, the people s/he works with, and the world s/he lives in. Thus, a person must learn to see that what he’s done has helped others. It is in the “seeing” what you do, what you accomplish - in people terms. Attitude is the difference maker (John Maxwell), a little thing that creates big things (Winston Churchill).

There are 3 perspectives that can help us redirect our lives and enhance the way we value our work.

First, we must view our work as a CALLING, rather than a JOB. Yes, our job requires us to be competent in order to be worthy of the salaries that we are paid. But it is not enough that we deserve the pay that we receive at the end of the day. We must also understand the reason why we do what we do. More than competence, we must perform our work well in view of a worthy cause: something that we can live for, or even die for. It is not about what we get out of it, but what we BECOME by it.

Second, we must learn to view DepEd as a place to BELONG, rather than a place to ‘survive’. DepEd must be understood truly as a HOME: a place where we all want to work. A place which we really can all help create. It is up to us to bring it about. It is up to the person seated beside you. It is up to every human being engaged in the business of CARING. Let us all then be contributors to engendering this home: where people are most authentic, where all the ‘crying’ ceases, where all the pretentions disappear, where we all shine bright like a diamond as Rhianna sang, and be the best of who we are. For, whatever we are, we must be the ‘best one.’

Finally, we must infuse into our work a world of MEANING. Sure, we CAN FIND meaning, but we CAN CREATE it, too! We can generate this meaning into our work by finding something that we can do, something that we can love, and something that we can HOPE for. DepEd Division of Balanga is a place where we can find something worthwhile to do, something essential that we can love, and something enduring that we can hope for.

May we rediscover in ourselves the moral courage to be true to our calling, to love our work, to ignite the passion to achieve, to believe in our dream, and finally to live well…