Monday Morning

Motivation    8/29/2011

THE POSITIVE PLACE. SALES MOTIVATION AND PERSONAL GROWTH

Finding a direction

I grew up among the mountains, and the mountains ran north and south. The streets were aligned north and south, east and west. It was all an orderly grid, and I knew which direction was which.

So it came as a surprise to me one summer’s evening in a different locale, to see the moon rising in the north.

Obviously, it wasn’t north after all -- but my internal compass had somehow defied me -- the direction I thought I was going wasn’t where I was going at all -- and oddly enough, it left me with a bit of a sickened stomach.

I thought of that last weekend, when I was in that same community. This time, I put the address into Google maps, and blindly followed along -- at least Google (and my phone) knew where I was going. I also have a GPS for the car -- and occasionally (I’m a bit of a geek) I put the GPS into test mode. In test mode, the GPS readout shows exactly which direction you’re going -- and it still makes my stomach hurt when I wind up disagreeing with it.

What does this have to do with anything aside from my digestion? We can draw an analogy from my experiences toward our lives. As we go through life, we gain experiences that help us find direction. Sometimes, those experiences leave us with a false sense of where things ought to be, what steps we should take, and which path to follow. In fact, in times of great change, like we’re going through now, we might find ourselves be lead down the wrong path entirely -- our experiences have led us astray because the data we based them on is old and no longer accurate.

So, as we determine our path in life, it’s important to check our direction. Like I used Google Maps to get to my destination -- even though I thought I knew where it was -- I was left with an independent, verifiable source to follow. Although I sometimes disagree with Google’s routing, I just can’t disagree with their ability to take a non-emotional approach to finding an address.

So here we are in life -- we need to find new or improved destinations -- and we need to make certain that the destination we’re shooting for is in the right direction. We need to take a firm approach to evaluating our destinations, and our routing to that destination, in our lives -- and then we need to ensure that we’re not being led astray by any pre-conceived notions that no longer are correct.

It’s important, of course, to be well grounded in who we are and where we came from -- but in times of great change especially, things have changed around us -- and the streets we once trod may not take us to the same location as before. Sometimes, we may run into detours, challenges, closures -- sometimes, we might find the destination has changed considerably, putting it somewhere we no longer want to travel to.

Life is a tricky thing, sometimes -- but if we remember that even though we might get a little sick to our stomach at times, change is not necessarily a bad thing (or a good thing, for that matter). We need to always make certain that we’re following a path that leads to a destination we want to achieve.

And remember one more thing -- the moon only rises in the north when you’re sitting on the south pole.

Copyright, 2011, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.Weekdaywisdom.com.