The Impact of Roles

Hello, my name is Ebony Kimario, licensed master social worker with the Oasis Treatment Center. This video talks about how to get what you want out of life by paying close attention to the roles that you’re playing. For the sake of this lesson, we’re going to use this formula: a role is made up of adding your responsibilities to your tools in order to get a specific set of rewards.

Hypothetically speaking, let’s say the role is a nurse. In order to be a nurse, you must have nurse responsibilities and utilize your nurse tools in order to get the rewards of being a nurse. The responsibility includes your mindset as well as your behaviors. So, in order for a nurse to be responsible, they have to believe in nursing. You don’t want a nurse who doesn’t really believe in medicine or who thinks that it’s all hokey; you need someone who’s got the right mindset. They have to believe that they can heal, that they can be helpful, and they have to believe in the field of nursing. You also need them to act like a nurse—a nurse has to have a certain bedside manner, a certain education, and a certain amount of experience. They have to do things that are in line with being a nurse. You can’t have a nurse that doesn’t like the sight of blood or who doesn’t like sick people; they’ve got to act like a nurse in order to be a nurse.

Next, we have our tools, which is made up of your environment—your people, places, and things. Your environment is a tool because that’s what you’re going to use to fulfill the responsibilities of the role. So, a nurse needs to be in a nurse atmosphere, like a hospital, a nursing home, or some other place where they can utilize their nursing skills. Your skill set is another tool. What you’ve learned to do is valuable to that role; there are certain skills and experiences that only you have that will make you more successful in the role that you’re playing. The skill set, the experience, and all of the education rolled up into one make for the skill set. Using the tools appropriately to carry out the responsibilities will get us to our reward. The reward is the desired outcome. Oftentimes, when we’re thinking about how our life would be improved, we’re really focused on the desired outcomes and not so much the rest of the work that comes behind it. For a nurse, the desired outcome may be helping people, making good money, having a flexible schedule, or whatever that person’s particular motivations are. We want to remember that rewards follow the role and not the desire. If you want to have a good-paying job, that’s just being focused on the desire—the role has to be more important. We have to be sure that the role comes with the reward that we’re seeking.

Now, I’m going to do an example of how this plays out for us as people. Let’s say that the role we want to play is a happy person. I want to be happy. I want to point out that happiness is a personal responsibility; happiness has to be the desire in order for it to be what we get to if we’re going to be happy. If that’s our desired outcome, we first have to marry the role. The role of being happy is going to be inclusive of certain responsibilities and certain tools, and this formula starts to look different for each person at this point. You want to make sure that you understand what it means to you. The responsibilities of a happy person would include their mindset—they’ve got to have a positive outlook. A happy person has to have some particular behaviors; they’re going to have happy behaviors. What that means to you is your business. For me, happy behaviors are mindful activities. For me, that looks like exercise, eating right, meditating, and the list can continue.

Then we want to bring in our tools. The tools that I use to make me happy are going to vary from what someone else uses, but we can use things such as a relationship—this is with anyone, your best friend, your sister, your significant other. Any relationship you have can be a tool for your happiness if we’re using it to go towards that particular role. If I’m in an unhappy relationship, then that’s going to be a tool for my unhappiness. It has to first be a healthy, happy relationship in order for it to be a tool for me to use towards being a happy person. I might also use my job. My job might bring me happiness because of the money, the success, having something to do, or being connected to co-workers. Whatever that looks like for me, my job—because I love being at the Oasis—is a tool for my success. However, if I didn’t like my job, then it would be a tool for my failure or a tool for my unhappiness. So we want to make sure that we know what the tools are that we’re using to get towards this label. Something else that I use to help me be happy, another tool that I use for my happiness, would be learning. I enjoy learning about anything—I like to read articles, I like to read books, I like to talk to other people—and that helps me to feel like a fulfilled and happy person.

Once I figured out a way to use my tools to carry out my responsibilities, then I can find the rewards. For me, the reward of being a happy person is that I get to be happy. It’s that every day I’m seeing the world in a good way; it’s positivity, that things are happening in my favor. It’s knowing that the work that my life is going to continue to go well because I am planning and scheduling for it to go well. Thanks for watching.