TIP 69
LEARN TO HEAR THOSE SUBTLE MESSAGES
Life has this in common with prize fighting: If you’ve received a belly blow, it’s likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.
Life is a marvelous instructor and usually a very kind one, too. We get sent all sorts of subtle little messages that tell us to wake up, but more often than not, we fail to hear them. We are so busy, we miss them altogether. Even if you do hear the message, “Hmm … the car is making a strange noise; I need to take it in for a tune-up,” you may ignore it or postpone resolving it. When you ignore the message, it gets a little louder and becomes a problem. When you continue to ignore the problem, it gets really loud and becomes a crisis. If you ignore the crisis, it may end up a disaster.
Take the example of my sister, who was training for the New York Marathon. She was going along just fine and then boom! She ends up in the hospital for two days with a kidney problem. She thought that the message was to drink more water because she had gotten dehydrated. She kept on running and training and even did quite well in the marathon, her very first one. She continued to run, and a great deal of her time and energy were directed toward this training as she looked for different races to enter. Then she went skiing with her boyfriend and blew out her knee so badly that the doctor said she would need surgery. She hobbled around for a good two months hoping it would go away, but finally went in for a three-hour surgery to the tune of $60,000. Fortunately she had insurance (Tip 30). The doctor removed most of the cartilage from her knee and said that she should not run again. She can run, but it will wear the bones down. She was terribly depressed and sat around feeling sorry for herself for quite some time.
After about six months, when she was well into physical therapy, I asked her why she had this accident (since there are no accidents). After some thought, she realized that she had been going down a very demanding physical path and that her true path in life was meant to be more intellectual than physical. She would stay physically active but not let her life revolve around it. She was literally stopped in her tracks from going down this path. Funny how the universe won’t let you stray too far. If she had been more sensitive to the early subtle messages, she might have caught on sooner and realized at her first hospital visit that she was pushing her body too hard. That was a fully recoverable crisis, but the knee damage is permanent. What is the universe trying to tell you that you have been ignoring?
Listen to the subtle messages and take drastic and immediate measures to compensate. If you bounce a check, sign up for overdraft protection, get automatic bill paying, and put more than you think you need in your checking account. If you lose a customer, take the client to lunch and find out why. Then survey all your customers to find out how to better meet their needs and make the changes to your business immediately. If you get the sniffles, take a megadose of vitamin C, get to bed early, and reevaluate your diet and exercise plan instead of pushing yourself harder and hoping it will go away.
Luke, the owner of an insurance company, really wanted to take some time off, but felt he couldn’t afford to. He had big goals for the month of August. I usually take August off because it happens to be the lowest-energy month of the year. Most folks don’t feel like ramping up their lives at this time of the year. Nobody really gets much done in August, regardless of their great intentions. It is just too hot and humid to work, and it is the last month before school starts so a general lethargy seems to prevail. Rather than fight this general tendency, I prefer to surrender to it completely and just declare it a holiday month. Even though I encouraged Luke to listen to the subtle message and take a vacation break, he thought if he pushed hard while others were at the beach, he’d be ahead of the game. He wanted to hire and train a new person, go out and bring in some new clients, and find a bigger office space.
When Luke checked back in September, he was feeling more exhausted and discouraged than ever. He didn’t find the new office space, he ended up hiring a recruiting firm to find the new employee, and he didn’t go out and get any new clients. He pushed himself hard even though he really just wanted to take some time off. Worst of all, he ended up getting sick and had to stay home for two weeks (his body really needed the break whether or not Luke was willing to take it). Luke then mentioned that although he didn’t do anything to bring them in, he did get some great referrals and got two new clients that met his sales goals for the summer. I pointed out that he had achieved two out of the three goals. Luke hesitated and then admitted this was true; he did meet his objectives even though he didn’t meet them the way he had originally planned. Of course, he could have reached the same end result if he had just listened to the subtle message (take some time off) and spared himself the misery of being sick for two weeks.
It is far better to err on the side of overresponding than doing just enough to get by. Start seeing the little clue as a warning that something bigger is on its way and respond to the little clue as if it were the big one. I’m not saying you should panic or make a big deal out of it; just handle it and handle it so well that you won’t have to worry about it again. This is part of doing complete work (Tip 38). It is Murphy’s Law that if you are prepared for it, it won’t happen. And if it happens anyway, well, at least you are prepared for it. It is really hard to attract success when you are deluged with problems, so see if you can catch them early on—before things get ugly.