Applying the Lessons of Today, Tomorrow

“I have nothing to say”

That’s a phrase that many writers are familiar with. It’s called “writer’s block”, and it’s not unique to those who make their living at a keyboard creating prose or novels or sales copy. Inspiration seems in short supply when we demand that it happen. We seldom recognize when we’re trying to force the proverbial square peg into a round hole. More often than not, frustration takes over and leads to inactivity, or its closely-related behavior, procrastination. Does this sound familiar? What happens when the hill before you seems insurmountable?

My friend “Pete” is a sales manager with a real estate brokerage firm. He’s tasked with hiring the “best and the brightest” from the stacks of resumes he receives each week, and then training those people to be successful. Determining career success or failure for these new hires is not Pete’s job. His role is to create an environment most conducive to success. Pete’s main frustration is when the promise that he saw in an interviewee fails to materialize when the broker is placed in the job he or she was hired for.

What I admire about Pete is that he doesn’t take the “failures” to heart. He recognizes that each new broker responds to different inspiration and motivation in the workplace. He could look at his inability to make a great hiring decision every time as a set-back, creating a spiral of procrastination that threatens to stall him when he needs to hire again. Instead, he applies the lessons learned, and builds a stronger set of hiring skills and behaviors to leverage the next time the stack of resumes threatens to topple off the edge of his desk onto the floor.

Start keeping a small journal to detail your failures (or “learning experiences” as I’ve heard them euphemistically called) and your successes. Note that it takes just as much time to detail the missteps as it does the shining moments. Recording those experiences allows you to attach equal weight to each, as opposed to making your mistakes appear huge, and minimizing the impact of your successes.