The latest blog post: Eating with a fork! You eat dinner with a fork. You use a hammer to pound in a nail and a lawn mower to cut your grass. You drive around town in a car and access your favorite online shops and social media sites from your computer or smartphone, running a piece of software called a browser. These are all tools. You take your car to a mechanic for service. You hire a plumber to fix the leak in your kitchen sink, go to the dentist to take care of your teeth, and the doctor when you have the flu. In a way, and not meaning to de-personalize any of those service providers, they too are tools: tools that you access when you need help or expertise you don’t have. Having the right tool is important. When you have the right tool, everything works better. Using the wrong tool – for instance, a bicycle when you need to travel 30 miles to attend a business meeting, a dentist when you have a case of laryngitis, or your friend the software engineer when you want to learn marketing – is exhausting and unproductive. It’s also expensive, in time, emotional wear and tear, and money. As business owners and self-employed professionals, we often skimp on the tools we need. We might believe we can tough it out on our own, or think we can’t afford to pay for help, or feel overwhelmed by all the choices and end up making no choice … believe me, I’ve been there and gone down each of those paths (and a few more besides). Denying ourselves the tools or the help we need doesn’t save anything. It certainly doesn’t save time, and in the long run not getting help tends to be far more expensive – emotionally and financially – than doing the work to determine what help we need and how we can get it. Yes, it’s hard to know whom to trust. I’ve certainly poured money into coaching relationships and training programs that didn’t yield the results I wanted. That sort of experience is frustrating and frightening and tends to reinforce the “do it myself” determination. But when we put off getting help, we struggle for longer than necessary – which is, to say the least, painful. And, as I said, expensive. It’s possible to eat your dinner without a fork (or a spoon, if you’re having soup), but it tends to be messy and not very enjoyable. Where do you need help? Can you open to receiving the help you need?
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 00:17:29 +0000