The Hidden Smiley face

The Hidden Smiley Face

This past month I have been challenged beyond comprehension with what we thought was a technical issue on our website. As with any organisation PJ and I split responsibilities: he loads our weekly newsletter to our mailing platform and I upload it to our blog on our website (if you have missed any and want to catch up).

I tried loading our second newsletter in October and it kept giving me errors. After weeks of struggling, I eventually decided to call in the experts (the people who host our site, whose support was amazing) to figure it out. After numerous hours on the phone and multiple attempts at trying to load the same content, we were no further from where we started. So, I decided to sit down one evening and try to load one of the other articles. And guess what… it worked!!! Turns out the problem was with a tiny, sneaky smiley emoji that was blocking the upload.

So why am I sharing this story?

Well, because I think I showed a huge amount of grit, which I would like to brag about (cheeky face emoji). All jokes aside I believe there lies a HUGE learning in this story. We so often do show a huge amount of what we believe is grit, by doing the same thing over and over and over and….. to no avail. We expect somehow that the repetition will lead to success (which in some instances does) when we are doing the right things. But, every so often we need to stop and take a hard critical look at whether or not we are actually doing the right things.

We (and I include myself here) waste so much unnecessary energy and time repeating behaviours that don’t actually serve us:

• We spend time with people or invest in relationships that are actually bad for us
• We keep eating the wrong things even when we know it makes us sick
• We go to bed too late or keep snoozing the alarms even though we know we need to get up earlier and spend time investing in ourselves
• We spend too much time looking at screens and too little getting sunlight or exercise
• We don’t schedule our priorities and become reactive in dealing with life

And then we end up feeling resentful, sick, angry, sad, lonely…

I would like to challenge you to slow down, zoom out and look at where you are potentially missing the smiley face or repeating the same process or behaviour and not getting the desired result. If you can identify any – make a change, try something else or ask for help. You will be better off for it.

Trusting the process only works when we have a good process to trust.

If you need some help getting to a process that works we would love to give you some perspective, get in touch. You can reach us at info@purposeworks.co.za.

At PurposeWorks we are all about Making You and Your Work Rock. Our focus is on Organisational Health and Design, Employee Centered Culture, Leadership Development and Performance Coaching. For more information on how we can help you create a work environment that rocks, develop a great team, become an inspiring leader or unlock your personal excellence talk to us at info@purposeworks.co.za.