A few weeks back I was interviewing a potential new Trade Partner and had the pleasure of an amazing conversation. This is truly one of the best things about being in business, is the opportunity to be engaged with a community of very wise, talented, and caring people. I have no earthly idea of how the topic came up, but it happened to be quite timely as is the tendency to happen when you spend time with good people. I’ve also put this out there to several of the business groups that we belong to for further amazing conversations.
There are a lot of areas of life where the temptation is to quickly fix things that are uncomfortable. We often try to fix moods and emotions by cutting a conflict short for example, which can tend to be a fix. One of the things that has shaped the way this is running through my head is to visualize a cast on someone’s leg. That cast is a good thing, it’s a fix. In many ways a fix (like a cast) is a great way to get things started. Something else that I’ve been contemplating about “fixes” is sometimes they can be exactly the M.E.D (minimum effective dose) like touching up your car after an unfortunate incident with a runaway shopping cart for example versus repainting the entire thing makes sense. There are also many times that a fix (again, think cast) can be very external, temporary, bulky, and lead to diminishing returns with subsequent attempts on the same thing. Our father, for as long as I can remember, warned us often that what was temporary can often become permanent or dangerous, because the fix allowed us to stop looking at the problem.
The real magic in most situations that I run across in my day to day is in the healing. While that cast is on, the real work is going on inside. The same goes for conflict, if we happen to be open for it anyway. It is the mirror that lets us look inside and heal ourselves from past wrongs, past hurts, and past fixes so we can enter the danger of an uncomfortable, but necessary conversation. Should we allow ourselves to become vulnerable and experience this process. we grow to become wiser, more relatable, and have the opportunity to build a pathway with the others involved on a personal level. Now we have common ground, healing and a growing path forward.
