I was doing my business in the bathroom the other day and happened to catch site of a small bug. (I’ve recently moved to Nairobi, Kenya where on top of luscious foliage, lots of bugs are a reality.) It was doing a crazy dance – imagine the most frenetic two year old hopping around the room and multiply that by 10. It went to, fro and then back to to and fro again.
I was getting dizzy just watching it. It’s path looked something like the above diagram. It started its frenetic dance at ‘A’ and ended at ‘B.’
And that’s the problem with Journey Life Lenses™ on a bad day. If their point is to enjoy the scenery then all the more power to them. Process, process and more process. Journey Life Lenses’™ strength is focusing on how things get done.
If however, the point is to get something accomplished on a deadline, then an extreme process focus of Journey Life Lenses™ can end up wasting a lot of space, time, energy and resources.
Sometimes a straight line between your start and your finish is a good thing.
If you’re a Journey Life Lens™ and you’re having a bad day, here are some tips:
- make sure you know what you ultimately have to accomplish
- know what your goal is, where you’re headed
- avoid your tendency to work out the perfect process if you’re under a tight timeline
- keep your eyes on your goal
If you work with a Journey Life Lens™ and they’re having a bad day, here are some tips:
- help them focus on what they’re need to accomplish
- help them identify their goal
- they will prefer to work on the process (how something gets done), if they have a tight deadline, help them avoid spinning their wheels by only focusing on the process
- keep their eyes on their goal
And Destination Life Lenses™ (Journey’s opposite), if you’re sitting there even slightly smugly, know that you too have your challenges. We’ll get to those on another day.
