a Series of 10 —the things we stop noticing

By my count I am 3 blogs away from having written 500 blogs on my two websites. I thought it might be an interesting idea to write these remaining blogs based on the common threads that have woven themselves through the last 497 I have written — and with that said, “a Series of 10” will continue with a blog on blind spots.

It wasn’t so long ago that I figuratively operated in three boxes of various sizes — my home, the little box I used to drive to the final box that I called my place of work. The boxes would change in configuration but overall this was the bubble I operated in. Don’t get me wrong, I would leave my bubble and do other things but would always return. It was how I framed the world. I liked the ways I looked at the world and I was rewarded well for it.

Like all things this eventually changed and I with it so did I. One of the things I adopted was to walk — I walked everywhere and I did it every day all year round. I think it was late March when I remember saying to myself, “So this is what Spring looks like”. Before Spring was always days on a calendar, but now it is the change in temperature, the melting of the snow, the first plants making their way and the sound of the world waking up. In my previous boxes I never experienced any of this, and frankly didn’t really care; I knew what Spring was if anyone had bothered to ask me — but why would they? We all knew what spring was, and it had very little to do with melting snow and plants coming to life.

Spring had been the end of Q1 and Q2, and was my least favourite season. Now it is my second favourite season and I even look at the quarterly rhythm much differently. Are you sensing the metaphor yet?

We build our models for success based on what we think we know, create our bubbles with like-minded people, develop the appropriate objectives to serve the bubble, and we form our habits based on it — if we are successful we even risk becoming arrogant. We narrow our perspective, develop a lens to look at the world and create blind spots. Why be curious when you already know everything you need to know and success has proven you’re “right”.

This is wonderful until change happens which always happens.

If you didn’t notice (or were too arrogant to notice) because your bubble always works you have a problem. Most change is subtle like spring and you may find yourself never satisfied with what’s started happening and struggling to fix it. Sometimes though, the change is so dramatic the bubble bursts, your model collapses and everything needs to be reevaluated and “rebuilt”.

Our bubbles are small and the world is vast and ever changing. It is always asking, “Why do I have to speak up? Maybe you have to listen harder”.

It’s important to metaphorically listen for changes regularly, don’t assume your bubble is safe, stay curious and remember there are many more perspectives than yours. As a final thought, if your bubble does happen to burst, you can always build another that’s even bigger and better — it may be the best thing that’s ever happened.

I love me a good metaphor.

iamgpe

2 more

Find your blind spots...

“I’m quite easy going”

A dear friend looked at me confused and said, “What are you talking about, you are one of the least easy-going people I know.”

I went on to explain myself with little success and we agreed to disagree.

Many things have happened since then — I shifted from a corporate setting to more of an entrepreneurial one, took on the city experience, became a professional blogger (you can say professional when you get paid), continued to craft my skill as a sales and marketing journeyman… and then a virus decided to make its presence known and changed everything. Like many of us, I hunkered down to ride out the storm, managed a small bubble, and worked hard to keep myself healthy and mentally sharp.

Segue to a small app called MindPal which became my companion to sharpen my mind — various games and puzzles designed to keep the mind challenged and nicely categorized to identify your strengths and those areas for development.

As the pandemic faded into fresh memory, I stopped playing MindPal and eagerly got back into a world that was the same but different — most importantly though, I was in motion again. Recently I picked MindPal for no other reason than to play some games, and in a non-pandemic mindset, intently studied the categories that in effect illustrated what my competencies looked like.

Speed, Memory, Attention, Flexibility, Language, Math and Problem Solving

I was not so much interested in the scores as much as the relative comparisons and was particularly relieved that Problem Solving was the strongest category (for no other reason than it validates my main value proposition). As I moved down the list I landed on flexibility and couldn’t help but smile.

Then, like now, she had been spot on.

Success comes with the ability to leverage your strengths and minimize your weaknesses and this ability creates the alchemy you need to meet any opportunity or challenge that comes your way. Unfortunately, an aspect of the human condition is to focus on our strengths (and those things that come easy to us) and shy away from our weaknesses (that are harder to deal with) — and this is a problem.

Not dealing with your weaknesses, to either turn them into strengths or minimize their impact, will impact the alchemy to drive success. Worse still, not recognizing you have a weakness simply creates a blind spot, and how will you make your way if you can’t see? I appreciate there are two viable strategies when looking at strengths and weaknesses — you could work to optimize your strengths and weaknesses so net-net you are in a good place or leverage your strengths so much that they overshadow your weaknesses and in effect become irrelevant. The merits of each can be debated but either way, you need to know what your weaknesses are and assess if they are impacting your success.

And one more thing.

There is a comfort that comes with our strengths because they come easy and during the pandemic, as I played with my MindPal app, I was reminded of a truism that tends to get dismissed because it is so counter intuitive — Comfort Kills.

We were not built to be too comfortable and are hardwired for challenge — if you don’t challenge your strengths and search out any blind spots (and improve on them), you will slowly find ourselves getting softer, weaker, duller, lazier, and less engaged; until one day you find yourself looking in the mirror asking yourself what happened.

I just gotta figure out the whole easy-going/flexibility thing.

iamgpe