Live in the Moment
One of the standout moments for me this week included a period of 30 mins or so on the long weekend where I was sitting outside watching my 4-year daughter learning to use a skipping rope, failing over and over again, and just the pure joy of trying & failing and laughing without a hint of being deterred. The joy of failure! I didn’t have my phone on me, I didn’t know what time it was, and I wasn’t thinking about work. I was immersed in the moment and I’d highly recommend this if you get the chance. Even when I go for a run or do pilates recently I’m thinking about work or what I need to do when I get home. Anyway it got me thinking about how we approach learning & failure as 4-year olds and then how we approach learning & failing in organisations and the path from A to B. Where along the path is the turning point when we start to fear failure, deprioritise learning & avoid trying? In some ways we make life harder for ourselves to avoid failure rather than embracing it to drive innovation. And after practising when it was time to head back inside she protested! She wanted to stay and continue to fail. The concept of failure had no negative resonance in her mind and it was the pure joy of trying to master a skill.
I wish I was even more like a 4-year old but I’ve at least retained the thirst for knowledge and am (mostly) undeterred by failures along the way if those failures nudge us toward bigger picture success. I love it when we fail because it’s an opportunity to improve. I hope I never reach the point where I stop learning, growing, trying, failing and improving. Recently we’ve had some leave and absences in the team and while people were away we struggled in some ways. These are failures we can improve on and we should approach them with positive gusto. If we are so reliant on individuals being present in order for business process to thrive independently then we still have room for improvement in our sustainable processes. We always will, that’s why continuous improvement! This over-reliance is what causes the stress around taking leave or the mountains of work when we return. Not cool.
A great blog read re gender equity:
Some takeaways from this week’s L&L:
https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/LT8oQQTo
Keep well and please prioritise that which matters most! 😊