Are you wired to take the harder or easier path?
It’s an area of contradiction for me. I tend to assume that the more difficult route is the right one — my brain’s distortion of The Road Not Taken alongside an over-developed Protestant work ethic I suspect. Yet at the same time, I love helping my clients find their easier path to success. For instance, when I work on increasing a team’s Adaptability Quotient, I’ll often say, “We all have to adapt. Why not discover your easier, preferred route to doing so and take that path through the woods of uncertainty rather than hacking your way through the brush of an uncleared trail?”
Denise Duffield-Thomas’s Chill and Prosper taps into this paradox. Why do I assume work should be hard?
The messages are numerous and insidious. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” has engraved a deep groove in our minds that reinforces not only a linear relationship between hours worked and money earned (Denise’s area of expertise is revamping our money stories) but that somehow legitimate work should not be easy.
Marcus Buckingham would beg to differ, and when I stop to think about it, so would I. He writes about aligning our work with our very specific loves, and I love that. When you are working according to how you are wired and gifted, it’s easy.
And easy isn’t bad.
When something comes easily to us, that ease can smooth the path to wiser, faster decisions.
So, pay attention to how you greet friction or resistance. Are you pushing through it? Minimizing or avoiding it? Or subconsciously creating it out of an unhelpful belief that harder must be better?
I’m right there with you.
Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle, it is a game.
~Florence Scovel Shinn