Lessons on Leadership from the Little Things in Life: Something Unexpected Is Likely to Slow You Down
Life is full of examples that teach us lessons. When we see or hear or experience something from which we can learn, it is that example and experience that often helps us remember the lesson. That’s why stories and illustrations make learning so much more effective. When a story can be used to illustrate or demonstrate a valuable lesson, the story makes it much more understandable, relatable, and memorable. And so I am sharing examples of circumstances and stories that I have experienced in my everyday life that illustrate leadership lessons that we can learn and apply. This is one of those stories, and it points out that there are often unexpected things that slow us down.
I was out running an errand on a weekday afternoon, and by the time I was done, people were beginning to head home from work, so I knew that there would be a little more traffic. But that is all that I expected – a little more traffic. What was unexpected was that on the route home, there were two different areas of construction traffic, and at each one, multiple lanes were narrowed down to one, which slowed the traffic to a crawl for a couple of miles each time. When we finally got through those and off the highway, and into our small town, we then got stopped by a train at the railroad tracks and had to sit and wait for another five minutes until the train passed. Eventually, we did get home, but it was a good bit later than we had expected.
As the Scottish poet Robert Burns said in 1735 in his poem “To a Mouse”, in a line that John Steinbeck made famous, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.“ So, like my drive home showed me, it doesn’t matter how much you plan and prepare; often, there are unexpected things that get in the way or slow you down. Sometimes those are things caused by circumstances over which you have no control, sometimes they are caused by other people (whether they did it intentionally or not), and sometimes it’s a result of a mistake that you made. Regardless, you weren’t planning on it, and it slowed you down or messed up your plans.
But that just happens. It’s normal. And because it is normal, and often unavoidable, the solution is not to keep it from happening, but, rather, to learn how to handle it. And that requires you to be able to do (or be!)a few things:
- Be positive. As frustrating as it may be, you get to choose how you respond. You can choose to be angry, bitter, or critical; or you can choose to be positive and joyful in spite of any circumstances. (This was the subject of an article here on LeadershipEzra.com a few weeks ago.)
- Be flexible. You must be willing and able to let things be different. That may mean giving up some control over circumstances and events, so that you can accept and allow things to progress in a different way than you initially planned. You must be flexible enough to be willing and able to let go, either in part or in whole.
- Be adaptable. Learn to modify and adapt your plans based on the circumstances. In my first senior leadership role, I recall saying frequently, “If that doesn’t work, we will do something different.“ We need to be willing and able to adapt our plans when unexpected things get away.
That’s the lesson on leadership from this little thing in life, from a trio of things that slowed me down when I was trying to get home. You will experience unexpected delays and obstacles. Certainly, you can put safeguards in place to avoid them as much as possible, but you will not be able to prevent them completely. Since that is the case, it is necessary that you cultivate the soft skills and abilities to handle those unexpected things well. You need to be positive, you need to be flexible, you need to be adaptable. Because something unexpected is likely to slow you down.
