What am I good at? Or more importantly, what am I not good at?
In my case it is organisation. In fact I have no real talent for it at all. Oh I can put all the bits of paper into pigeon holes, I can do organisation at that level. I am referring to business organisation, or seeing the big picture as it is often called.
Our business, Sian (my wife & mine), had hit a bit of a plateau indeed it was bordering on a slump. Losing direction and drive and gradually slowing down without us immediately being aware of it.
The reason that this condition had come into being was because I had wondered off the path. I had started dabbling in, what to me might as well be the occult, I had put another business hat on that didn’t fit and it had now fallen down over my eyes.
I am an implementer, a doer or a finisher. I can take a system and knuckle down and see that it works. Burrowing through the debris and picking out the bits that work and then assembling them into a logical machine that achieves a task, that I can do. What I can’t do, the job that the hat belonged to, is coming up with the ideas in the first place.
What I mean is if you said you need a machine to make toast, no problem one machine coming up. If on the other hand you said “I’m bored with this bread and I hate having to throw it away when it starts to go a bit stale”, don’t look to me for a way out.
So my getting bored with what I am good at. Well actually it involved me throwing my toys out of the pram, having a bit of a sulk until Sian got so fed up she said “OK you do it”. This was the last thing that our business needed. Now Sian was doing bits of her job, watching me meddle with bits of it, and then putting them right. In the mean-time no one was doing any of the implementing: I had no time because I was getting bogged down with the other stuff and Sian sensibly doesn’t do it because that’s not her strength.
After awhile, I was in out of my depth in fact I was totally lost. Worse, I was so lost I couldn’t even realise it. And being a bloke I wasn’t about to stop and ask for directions, I was just going to keep driving around until I saw the way out or ran out of fuel. Thankfully the sensible one of the partnership came to the rescue and pointed out, in very blunt terms, that I should stick at what I am good at and stop getting in the way.
It was only when I had stopped, stepped back and thought about it that I realised just how lost, and actually uncomfortable with what I was doing, that I had become.
So now I have picked up all the toys and put them back in the pram, have got the focus back, and things are moving forward again.
My advice to all; find out what you are good at and excel and be happy at it. Get someone else to do the other bits that you are not comfortable with or good at (be honest here). But perhaps most importantly let them get on with it, without your help!
My thanks to caterina for the photo
