Instinct: The Power to Unleash Your Inborn Drive (16 page)

Learning from the masters prevents becoming enslaved! Most highly successful and accomplished people have mastered many worlds, which I’m calling “jungles” here. When we look to these people as role models, mentors, and teachers, we receive juggling lessons!

If you use this principle even on a small scale, it will bring order to your chaos and change the way you perceive obstacles on your path. More opportunity emerges when you organize a cluttered life. You can be philanthropic
and
profitable, work
and
volunteer, raise children
and
have a career, if you catch the principle. You can add to what you have without losing
what you’ve accomplished, if you stop holding everything so tightly and simply learn to juggle!

Your life should be as diverse as your interests. Think of the diversity exhibited in a shopping mall: one building with diverse stores but shared cost and leadership. A mall is the gathering of many stores around one common location. Look at what combined strengths do to marketing, management, security needs, customer traffic, and parking—a mall houses the seemingly unrelated under one roof and manages them all in spite of their diversity.

The one-roof concept unifies diversity. Finding the one roof, or in other words the points of connectivity, is essential to bring better management and faster movement to your life. To understand what’s touching the things you touch will help you move laterally and not take crazy leaps into wild choices. One of those points of connectivity in your world is you. You are the shared interest. You are the ultimate brand. But there may be others, so keep looking.

In the case of the mall, we see many. They all need lights and heat, air-conditioning and maintenance. They all need management and, most important, they all need people. When you find what’s common in your life, it lowers stress and organizes the future.
And you don’t have to be the Galleria or the Mall of America to benefit from organizing the diverse interests into a structurally sound whole. Successful stores don’t discard what brought them success even as they innovate for what’s before them.

The demands on your life don’t have to be identical to be interrelated. That passion you have, the vibrancy of your intellect, the experiences you’ve garnered help propel you forward like a comet, grow into a planet, and soon become a new universe. This literally means that before long you are the tender and keeper of many fields.

Now is the time for you to build a team that enables you to better juggle the responsibilities and the opportunities that are waiting for you. What I want you to get from this chapter is how to touch everything you have, all the diverse areas of your life, from a position of maximized instinct.

E
ven when following our instincts, we may unknowingly fall into detrimental patterns. We do it because at one time a procedure or method worked, but now we can’t seem to notice that what once sufficed no longer satisfies. We know the world is constantly changing around us, but we remain several paces behind our instincts’ attempt to keep up with those changes. Adjusting to new worlds, new ideas, and new concepts is important in any sphere of life, but perhaps even more when you’re living by instinct.

All past practices aren’t always good practices. Please understand this isn’t a clarion call to change for the sake of changing. No, it is more aptly a challenge to remain vigilant to changes around you and to make adjustments to old ideas and concepts that may have outlived their usefulness. In a relationship, matrimony
slides into monotony. In a job, enthusiasm melts into mediocrity. In a company, irreplaceable becomes irrelevant. In a ministry, determination deteriorates into decoration. No matter your perspective or preference, old ideas that are unchallenged become the gateway to antiquation.

I’m often forced to wrestle my own attraction to the familiar. My need to have consistency often has to be overhauled to sustain the adventure of achieving traditional outcomes in nonconventional ways. My desired objectives may not have changed, but my methods constantly have to adapt to keep pace with an ever-changing world. Because, like it or not, the ground moves under our feet whether we feel it or not. If you want to remain in the room with the chosen and not in the basement of relics, then your ideas must remain fluid and your approach flexible as you implement those ideas.

Some years ago, we kept in contact with our partners by mailing them letters. It was important and necessary, effective and engaging. I got most of my responses from mail, and we had companies to assist us with mailing from our database. Now, the contracts with those companies remained in place, but busyness kept me from noticing that we were doing the same things we had always done with increasingly fewer results. We were mailing people who were
e-mailing
us back. Duh! It seems obvious that a change was necessary, doesn’t it?

Well, it would if I weren’t lulled to sleep by busyness and distraction. I suppose it took almost a year for Rip Van Winkle here to wake up and smell the coffee. The world had changed right under my feet, but my system of reaching people had not changed to keep up. Once I recognized the problem, I had to readjust systems and discovered that the old company helping us mail our audience was snoring in the bed right beside me! They hadn’t updated their equipment or method of reaching people to accommodate the new trends, either.

It reminds me of the way my wife continued cooking meals for the kids who used to live with us, and then discovering the abundance of leftovers! Our house was a collection of Tupperware dishes and aluminum foil, all based around the fact that past practices hadn’t been challenged while our household had changed. As empty nesters, the garbage disposal started eating up our spoiled leftovers faster than the timer on a microwave can beep!

Once we recognized that our family household had changed, then we began changing our practices to catch up. In all areas we had to have a talk. Maybe we don’t need family packs of pork chops when it’s just the two of us for dinner. Maybe buying staples such as sugar, flour, and salt in bulk quantities was no longer cost-efficient. We discovered that not being flexible is expensive and more times than not ineffective.

Suddenly I realized that we were caught with our eyes closed to the fact that change anywhere means
change everywhere! Less laundry, less utilities, no more leaving the key outside in the planter for late-returning teenagers! We had been recalibrated by the decisions of others and hadn’t assessed the impact that their decisions would make on our lives. Change, of course, isn’t a bad thing; it’s great to see our children become adults and launch their own lives independently. However, if we hadn’t adjusted, then we would have continued missing out on some of the benefits of this blessing!

Our very survival and ability to sustain our success relies on our instincts. For example, an archeological team decided to do research on the remains of the prehistoric bones of the apatosaurus. This was one of the tallest dinosaurs that could get on its hind legs to eat vegetation from the highest foliage of the times. Its past practices had sustained it for years. But as it continued to breed more and more of its species, the growth of the vegetation of its era didn’t keep up with the demand. At the saturation point, there were a lot more apatosauruses than treetop foliage! Supply could not keep up with demand.

This creature apparently could not adapt. You need to be sensitive to changes in the environment so you can adapt accordingly.

While other prehistoric animals faced extinction because of predators and climatic changes, the apatosaurus, also known as the brontosaurus, is theorized to have self-destructed simply because it didn’t instinctively adapt to the need to bend its neck and eat from the foliage a little lower on the trees. The entire species could’ve likely lasted longer had the apatosauruses not been inflexible in their ability to move beyond their past practice. The much-needed food source was literally a short radius from where they faced total depletion. Just below barren branches grew an abundant food source that would have easily nourished them.

This illustration takes the term
stiff-necked
to a new level! When you or those who assist you develop a stiff-necked view of the possibilities around you, it can have lethal consequences. Increase the radius of your thinking and creativity, and you will find new foliage. We see it every day in second marriages, new managements in old business, and new leadership in churches. We see it in changing the staff at a school. It’s a tragedy when someone with less rigidity can turn your wilderness into a vegetable garden by implementing simple things that were within your view but off your radar because of your commitment to “the way we do things.”

Think about it this way: if you are too predictable in any area of your life, you may be paving the way to your own extinction! Reflect for a moment on how you usually recognize and regard the changes around you. Is your inability to adapt to the world around you your
greatest enemy? Could it be possible that you could meet traditional needs in contemporary ways?

The real challenge for many people, marriages, ministries, and companies is that they don’t have people around them with enough neck-stretching enthusiasm to mix up their sources of inspiration and innovation. The tops of their trees become stripped of the creative nourishment that’s required to adapt and to thrive! They need people who are always seeing changing trends, birthing new ideas, and glimpsing new horizons. They need nimble minds and maybe agile necks to bend the conventional rules and go against the grain when necessary.

Unorthodox thinkers are creative. They deviate from the traditional to the transformative and break into new foliage by discerning the times and making the changes necessary to at least keep things the same if not make them better! Stiff-necked people will destroy vital opportunities because they can’t adapt to trends and changes around them—they remain too intent on defining themselves by past practices. They think “I have never” when they really mean “I can’t evolve.” Sadly, they often end up in the valley of dry bones.

As you instinctively adapt your past practices to the changes around you, please understand that your
adjustments may or may not be the best practices. Past practices never take the place of best practices. And best practices are often modified by changing seasons and stages of evolving. What is best when you are twenty may not be best when you are fifty. What is best when you are single may not be best when you are married.

Understand that even if you’re not running a company, you still have a brand. Your personal brand may keep its core values, but it’s dangerous to hold on to antiquated practices. Best practices are always affected by new inventions, new relationships, and new opportunities. People who are afraid of change are afraid of success.

In my ministry I’ve learned that my core values seldom need adjustment. These are the ethical ideologies that define who we are as a church. But at the same time, if I do everything the way I did when I started out, I’m not really growing at all. The message doesn’t change, but the method must always evolve.

In my private business, the same principle applies in even greater ways. Not only does the method change, but sometimes the message changes also. Depending on new experiences that alter how we do business, and new opportunities that unleash possibilities that weren’t originally an option, we have to adapt.

So periodically I’ve learned to do assessments of what was and what is. In my marriage from time to time my wife and I will go on more frequent dates.
During these seasons, we explore each other’s lives again and discuss who we’ve become. As a result, we’ve learned that one of the most lethal toxins to our relationship is predictability. Keeping our life together fresh means not taking each other for granted and assuming what used to bring each other joy is still the same. So as we age and evolve what really helps is open-mindedness. Giving each other the right to grow and change together helps us not to grow apart.

Relearning what you thought you knew well is important in every facet of life. It is presumptuous to think that silence means contentment. In every area of your life, it’s unwise to think that silence is equal to consent. Many times frustration wears silence for the benefit of political correctness. People go with the flow to keep the waters calm. So when you implement changes to keep up with life’s unexpected twists and turns, understand that you may encounter some white-water rapids. In other words, giving people the freedom to be honest may cause painful discussions in the short run. But in the long run, it will save you the painful extinction of the vibrancy that makes people want to be around you or work for you.

Anytime you assess someone by who they were without considering who they have become, you are setting yourself up for failure. People change. They evolve. They grow and develop and want to be used at their highest capacity. Stability and security are
important, but not at the expense of vibrancy and volatility.

I don’t know about you, but I really hate to hear someone say, “I knew you when…,” as if this means that it’s wrong for me to change. Everything matures—anything that doesn’t change is fruit dying on the vine! People are happiest when they can be appreciated for who they are and not just for who they were when you first met them! Our ability to grow and change, to learn and expand, keeps us curious, charismatic, exciting, and fresh!

Like so many aspects of life, this ability to adapt and grow requires you to be instinctive and not just informational. Information is based on past assessments, but instincts signal that something has changed. To be sure, people often transform right in front of us, but we miss it because we’re relying on old information or an assessment stuck on our first impression of them.

However, it’s as useless as last year’s newspaper to rely on what you used to know about a person. People need to be appreciated at the level they are on now. This is especially true when they are constantly improving themselves but imprisoned by how your limited view contains them. In order to be sensitive to those changes, you have to pay attention to people. Looking at a person is far different from just seeing them. Such alertness can stop you from longing for something that is really accessible to you but not detected by you! I’ve been there.

A few years ago I was interviewing candidates for a very important position in my organization. I had hired a firm to assist me, as I had come to learn that intellectual capital is very important in business. In many ways smart people are more significant to growth than economic capital. This position would likely transform my company and allow me to delegate responsibilities that should rightfully be done by someone else. I had huge respect for the position, and I had headhunters searching high and low for a person who could grasp quickly the culture in our business and move dexterously into innovation with little disruption to the chemistry that defined us.

I reviewed some wonderful résumés—of course, résumés are
always
wonderful! But as we began to vet them, I found that most of the applicants weren’t suitable for the position I was trying desperately to fill. I became frustrated that it was so challenging to find the right person.

As the search continued, one day I was riding to an appointment with an employee relatively new to our company. He said, “You know, I think Mr. Wilson”—not his real name—“would be tremendous for that role!” Maintaining a poker face, I thought to myself, “That’s ridiculous.”

I had known Mr. Wilson for years, and what he did
for us was nowhere near what this new position called for. But I have a habit of playing most conversations over a time or two before filing them away. And the more I thought about it, the more this conversation refused to be deleted. In fact, the more I thought about how much Mr. Wilson had grown as a person and enhanced himself along the way, the more I thought my new hire was right. So I ended up hiring Mr. Wilson into that role, and he has been a huge asset ever since.