Push forward or Pause and Reflect
You have a goal and hit an obstacle. What is your best plan of attack?
Before you go on the offensive, pause and reflect on the following four elements that may affect your desired outcome. With this information in hand, you are better equipped to better determine your best plan forward.
Does your personality help you or hurt you in this situation?
What is your natural tendency? Stop and think about this? How we behave in any given situation has an impact on the results. Are you naturally assertive or more inquisitive? Do you like to talk or are you a great listener? Do you strive for perfection, like logic, or guide your behavior by a set of core principles? Are you gritty? Do you find yourself verbally aggressive, or just persistent? Do you believe you smarter and therefore mostly right? Is power important to you? How about kindness. And what, if anything, changes when you are placed under stress?
How important is this goal?
If it is of low importance, ask yourself if it is worth the push or might there be a better strategy in the pause and reflect? On the flip side, if it is of high significance, review your answers around your personality. With goals that are important, we tend to amplify our dominant behaviors. By understanding your personality, this allows you to read and respond according to the situation. If you are more aggressive, is that behavior going to help or hurt the situation? If you are more passive, how is that going to help you overcome the obstacle in front of you? Sometimes, in certain situations, we need to dial up a behavior that is not easy or natural. Aggressive may need to step back and passive may need to step up.
What assumptions am I making about the obstacles I face?
Expertise and experience can become a blind spot. When we hit an obstacle, our attention sharpens. Our first instinct can be to rely on our past experiences and the expertise we have built. While incredibly important, this can get in the way of looking at something from a new or different perspective. By pausing, you are stepping outside of your embedded response, getting curious on other ways to think about the issue, exploring your assumptions, or asking yourself what you may not know or may need to learn.
How do your pattens affect the relationships around you and how important is this to you?
Each person comes from a unique place in their thinking and in the way they interact with those around them. Every action that you take will affect the relationships that you consider important. If you tend to jump in and solve the obstacle before others have the chance to try, are you doing a disservice to that person’s growth?
The power of the pause and reflect can help open a solution to the obstacle. While we naturally might want to attack, stepping back to consider our ‘go to’ behaviors, assumptions, relationships and relevancy of the goal provides opportunities to discover the best solution and opens the chance for better long-term results.