Last week we talked about the gift of time: the ability to organize our schedule to include practices of professional gratification and self care: how, when and why we do what we do, who we interact with professionally and personally.
We have evolved into a society that has become accustomed to - indeed we anticipate - immediate gratification and results. We become frustrated when desires, expectations, wants and sometimes yes, needs, are not met nearly instantaneously. We can make reservations online in real time for an hour from now, telemedicine is a thing, we no longer have to wait to make an appointment with our doctors, Zoom and Facetime are substitutes, Amazon orders will arrive in a day or two. Want to watch a movie? Netflix it is. Read a book? Download it using Kindle. Need a definition or a thesaurus? Google it. Want to listen to that great song you just heard online or on the radio? Itunes it is, immediately streamed to your Bose speaker. Want to look up that interesting article referenced in a podcast? New York Times online, copy and paste the link…...Boom.
Preparing dinner about a month ago, I was slicing an onion and chopped off the top part of my thumb and fingernail. It was painful, bloody and my digit had a heartbeat. I was able to triage the wound myself with a bunch of adhesive tape, gauze, especially colorful language, was able to finish cooking dinner, awkwardly to be sure, and settled into the evening with my hand above my heart to stem the throbbing. The next day and the next and the next happened waiting anxiously for the wound to heal: the cut was still extremely raw, bandages needed to be changed and disinfected twice daily. I got through the first week with slight improvement, but was still encumbered with the loss of use of my thumb (never really thought much about the usage until it was absent). In any event, the thing took about a month to heal to the point where I was able to use my hand like a normal person, and it occurred to me, my body needed time to recover and no amount of wishing, complaining or dreaming was going to speed up the process.
While I certainly don’t recommend this specific experiment as a reminder that some things take time, it is worth a modicum of reflection. Some things take TIME. Human things take time. Connections take time: to initiate, develop, nurture, maintain and sustain. They require being present, curious, and acting with genuine interest and engagement.
Getting to know someone - building relationships - takes effort and intention. Meeting someone with whom you have a commonality - professionally or personally - lets us know there’s a connection. Expanding on that connection requires a motivation to further know that person, which means following up and planning a next meeting or exchange, consistently.
Walking through the fear and discomfort of feeling shy, misreading the perceived connection, disbelieving your own instincts, questioning your own contribution to conversation, feeling self conscious, worrying that you might not have anything meaningful to say, trusting your instincts, feeling self confident in how you present yourself, worrying that you might be interrupting their days, worrying about maybe having spinach in your teeth….. all take courage and fortitude. They are HUMAN fears: emotional, understandable and explainable, but the immeasurable rewards in doing so are far greater than the fears themselves and the subsequent confidence we build each time we find the success of developing and nurturing each connection, far outweigh the temporary uneasiness.
The ability to tease out the emotional response of discomfort and confidently (or not!) push through the fears are what separates the successful from the isolated. All connections - in business or in our personal lives - are made manifest as a result of relationships: none of you would be reading this if you didn’t have some connection to FIG or Randell over the years. We have become conditioned to immediate gratification, the expectation of immediate results - and understandably discouraged when we don’t experience satisfaction promptly.
Shifting these attitudes and perspectives is what we do at FIG. It is our life’s work, a passion project and, in our view, an imperative: to remind ourselves of our humanness - specifically in the professional sphere - and the natural pace and cadence of human beings in relationships. As a species, we REQUIRE human interaction, and FIG’s calling is to remind ourselves of the richness, the fulfillment, the joy, the satisfaction, the success professionally and the confidence we build in creating these human ties and connections. With TIME.
Until next time (pun intended!)…….