Confused Dog!

Today, a stranger approached me and started talking to me. He claimed to be a fortune teller and he said that I was going to have some pleasant surprises , there will be some change ahead ... I smiled and I said , I know....it doesn't take much to know that there will be change , that's the only thing that is guaranteed to happen...Change!!!

Most people resist change, we don't actively go out and embrace change. This is because it disrupts our routines and causes confusion. A friend taught me that " confusion is a sign that you are learning something new" and yet we don't like that feeling of confusion ...it can be overwhelming and gives us a feeling of being out of control. When I learnt this from my friend, it changed my perspective of confusion, I still don't like the feeling because of the way we have been programmed to think from childhood but i can recognise it and go """mmmm...that's interesting" or " hurray I am learning something new at last"

How many times a day do we get confused ? ...hardly if any .... what does it tell us about how much we are learning?? I think that the precursor to confusion is change. So the game shifts, we resist, we get confused and then we work through this change. Sometimes we go around in circles before we actually arrive at a place where we feel that we are back in control again.... a place we are not learning again. Looking at it another way, we go through a period of incompetence before we feel competent especially when we do something new. When we go through this time of incompetence , we hate it , we resist it , we say that we don't like the loss of control but its also because we have been taught to believe that its a sign of weakness or stupidity to be unsure of what we are doing.

Those in leadership positions need to surround themselves with smart thinkers...people who are better than themselves. This way they can be sure of getting good advice when they make decisions. But this means being comfortable with feeling incompetent and feeling out of control. I had to learn to give up any chance of control when I ran a technology company. I was working with young people who were more talented and skilled than I was, in their fields of expertise. I learnt very quickly that i didn't have to know everything, in fact it was good that I didn't because I offered an "out of the box" perspective as the "weirdo on the fringe" . For me , this is invaluable because it allows me to spot things that others cant see and often within this lies unique opportunities.

We know the future will change and one of the things I have had to learn is. to not go too far ahead of my team with my vision, sometimes I need to pace the rate at which my team copes with change as its a scary proposition for most people to make big changes. Change for the sake of change is not useful , it needs to be relevant. But I also don't want to be at the other end of the spectrum by not participating in life because of the fear of change and ....watch life go by from the sidelines. I have learnt from a young age that " either you catch life by the collar or life will catch you by the collar " ...that usually happens when you are least prepared for the change. We may get a litte tap on the shoulder or a nudge and if we still don't respond, something big happens to make us sit up and take stock. Reminds me of the time i met in a car accident. I was travelling so much and even though I knew that my car needed to be serviced , i didn't bother. One day, on my way to a radio interview, my car skidded when I tried to stop at a traffic light. I remember the moment when my car started to skid, I thought to myself" this is not happening to me". I skidded off the road, hit a traffic light and power box and my car ended up in huge drain. I nearly hit a pedestrian , who had to jump into the drain to avoid the car. My car was totally wrecked and although I only suffered a slight bump on the head, I remember the pedestrian telling me that he was inches away from his death. That really shook me up.... the thought that i nearly killed someone. I remember thinking to myself that night about what happened and trying to describe what had happened. The first words that came to my mind was " runaway car" and then I realised that my life at that time was like an out of control car and that I needed to stop and take stock. When I sat down to think about it , that night , i remembered all the little taps and nudges I received and how I chose to ignore them. The car accident was just a catalyst to make me stop the frenzy in my life at that time, it was an external manifestation of my internal world.

Instead of taking each incident that happens as something unconnected to the rest , I now try to see the bigger picture and usually a pattern emerges. This helps me to direct the change I want to incorporate into my life.

To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson : Everything in the universe goes by by indirection, there are no straight lines"