Success is never binary. And very rarely you land on a 0 or on a 1.
Most often, you find yourself somewhere in between.
Understand this to appreciate the progress you have made, as well as the path you still have ahead of you.
Tag: empathy
The road you take
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.
Only once
It’s rarely as bad as we think it is.
It’s rarely as bad as we think it will be.
We put stakes on the things that happen to us and we never pause to think that it is us who determine how important outcomes are.
Is failing at a job truly that disastrous?
Is delivering a project late really so determinant of the company’s future success?
Is expressing our doubts or asking a difficult question truly going to jeopardize the relationship with a friend?
If a behavior is repeated across time, it is wise to take note and try to address it. But if it happens only once, is it really going to be that bad?
Probably not.
Time to heal
You need to give wounds proper time to heal.
Of course, you want to get back to work. Of course, you want people to accept your point of view and get back to their tasks. Of course, you are all working on something bigger and the time spent grieving is time not spent pursuing a new opportunity.
But wounds do not heal as fast as you’d want them to. People do not heal as fast as you’d want them to. You do not heal as fast as you’d want to.
Give it time. And in the process, do listen. You will learn something about wounds, people, and yourself.
Getting ready for the next wound.
Stories over numbers
Numbers come after stories, and stories others can relate to come after stories we can relate to.
We like to think of the world as a rational place, where people make decisions based on a set of available information. Of course, that is far from what we experience every day.
If you want to inspire action you need to remind this.
You've got this 