If today you have spent more time checking news sites and social media rather than doing your work, that’s ok. If you have been distracted, if you have struggled to focus, if you now feel you have achieved nothing, that’s ok. If the last minute meeting felt like just too much to take, that’s ok.
If your boss or somebody else has not extended their full support, empathy, and understanding, that is not ok.
Take your time. Breathe.
We’ve got this.
You get out of a three-hour meeting where you have discussed important topics for the future of your team, your department, your company.
The first instinct is to share the bits and pieces of information you have collected with your peers – impressions, thoughts, gossips, directions, changes, tasks. If you are leader, you’d probably call right away an extraordinary meeting with people reporting into you, just to make sure that everybody can share in your own frustration, excitement, or whatever it is that you are feeling.
It would probably be a lot better, though, if you would take a moment to actually think about what just happened. Go for a walk. Call it a day. Take a piece of paper and write down what you have heard. Sleep on it. Go on for one or two days before talking to anybody that was not in that meeting about what comes next.
Your confusion does not have to be other people’s confusion.
Sure, sharing is fantastic and it makes you feel a little less lonely. But when you do not yet have a clear idea of what you should share, is it really worth it?
It’s ok to be cheerful even when not everything is going well. It’s ok to be down even when most things seem to be perfect.
We need to be able to recognise that life is made of a multitude of pieces. The one that is in front of us right now is what determines our current mood. And fortunately there is much more for us to appreciate, at any given time.
The real edge in today’s world is not to have all the answers, but to motivate people to invest their resources – time, energy, money, attention – to find the answers. Possibly working with others.
We all heard that the world is more complex than ever, more ever-changing than ever, more fast-paced than ever. Yet we fail to understand what that means. Most of us are not asked to draw from their previous expertise to come up with ready-made solutions. Quite the contrary, the more you can tame the knowledge and information you have, sit with a problem, ask around, collect ideas, prepare the setting, coach people, lead the execution, the more you will be relevant.
We don’t need actions. What we need is systems.
If you navigate the internet in search of answers and all you get is confusion and frustration, you are not any different from most of us.
And it is not that people are mean and they don’t want to let you in their own secret.
The point is that there is no secret.
There are probably hundreds of roads to get where you are going. Some of them seem similar, some are very different, some contradict each other. Some are cryptic, some are clear, some seem to go in completely different direction but are actually the two sides of a same coin.
It’s easy to get lost on roads that others have built for themselves.
That’s when you understand that the only road that matters is the one you choose to take. Every day.
You've got this 