As humans, we all change and grow. We learn more about our jobs, enhance our skills and knowledge. We do the same in our personal lives. We also create our own personal and business Gravity as we go along our way – that’s just human nature.
But there’s another form of Gravity I only recently discovered. What is it? Well, it’s the limitations we put onto others when we Pigeon Hole who they are and what they can and can’t be and do – based on their past. Even as they grow and evolve into new beings, how often do we continue to see others in the same light as when we first met them?
Making assumptions about someone based on who they were in the past is not the way to support their growth. We all change and evolve – whether we want to or not. But in many cases, people learn and grow, heal old wounds, shed their past.
The challenge is that as humans – as those Natural Born Gravity Machines – we tend to hold others in their ‘roles’. That’s a huge form of GRAVITY.
Take for example the manager who pigeon holes his or her new marketing administrator fresh out of school as a junior player. That’s probably accurate at that point in time. But what happens when this junior player steps up, works above and beyond to take on new responsibilities, learn faster than others, carries more weight and just plain grows like a weed – in skills, knowledge and just plain aptitude?
If we don’t step up to evolve our perception of this ‘junior player’, we’re holding them in Gravity. That impacts their own progress, even as it limits their contribution to our business success. As that ‘junior player’ is ditching Gravity right and left to soar – we’re holding them down thanks to our own suddenly stale perceptions of them. Now that’s some nasty Gravity!
Do you take the progress others have made into account when you view the folks around you? It’s hard sometimes – because we can all change and adapt so quickly. It takes a conscious focus on evolving our ‘other-focused’ perceptions as we move through our business lives.
If we want to truly defy gravity and grow, we must learn to adapt our perceptions of others, just as we adapt our perceptions of our businesses, our markets and ourselves. That’s when we really start to soar!
