Lessons on Leadership from the Little Things in Life: Eating an Elephant
Life is full of examples that teach us lessons. 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. With that in mind, I want to take some time to do just that – share examples of circumstances and stories experienced in everyday life which illustrate leadership lessons that we can learn and apply.
I said previously that learning happens all the time and that opportunities to learn are all around us. One of the implications of that is that those lessons come from both everyday experiences and from life’s challenges. Life is full of wonderful, normal, and difficult experiences and events, and all of them bring lessons from which we can learn. This is one of those lessons that came from difficulty.
My wife and I had lived in our home for almost 10 years, but this home was different than others that we had lived in because we believed it would be our last home. Over those 10 years, we had done a lot to make it our dream home. But then God changed the direction of our life, and we had to list our home for sale and move. Part of me resisted this change because I didn’t want to leave this home. Part of me struggled with the uncertainty that it brought because, although God had stretched my faith with experiences of uncertainty in the past, in our years in that home, I had grown complacent in my faith, so this experience caused me to struggle much more than the challenging experiences that had affected me in the past.
Because of those things, I began to struggle with feelings of anxiety and being overwhelmed. I had to pack up our home, but I kept putting it off. Of course, that only increased the anxiety, because it caused me to get further behind and have more to do, even as I was resisting. I had started moving some things out of the house and a storage unit, but I kept looking at what I still had left to do, and the time I had left to do it, and was finding it difficult to move forward. In that moment, I had to make a decision to force myself to act in spite of my feelings, and take the next step anyway. And then I had to keep doing that over and over again, one step at a time. In the end, after everything was packed and stored, and we were on to our next adventure, I could see God’s presence in the whole process, and knew that He was moving us for a purpose and was teaching me along the way.
So, what is the little lesson to learn from this life experience? Among other things, it is a reminder that when you are called to do something, it takes effort, self-discipline, and commitment to move forward with what you have to do, especially when you are battling against yourself. Like the old proverb that pointed out that the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, when you are faced with a task and your emotions and anxieties are making it difficult, you only need to do the next step. Then, keep doing the next step after that. What matters is that you keep going. It’s the idea of “facts over feelings,” of exercising the discipline of doing what you have to do even when you don’t feel like it. It’s taking responsibility for what needs to be done and doing it.
The leadership lesson from this little thing in life is simply to do the task you have to do even when you don’t feel like it. It’s a necessary part of your responsibility as a leader (and as an adult!), and eventually your feelings will follow (meaning, you will feel good about getting it done once it is over). Eat that elephant one bite at a time.
