What If The Answer To Your Problem Is To Hit the Gas

I’m a thinker by nature and trade. I can sit and think about an issue from twenty different camera angles and I believe it’s a good thing. I’ve created a nice career out of thinking and sharing my thoughts. That said, though, there’s a downside to the thinking life.

The downside is this: Sometimes thinking is not what we need to do to solve a problem.

What we often need is to simply take action.

I learned this lesson taking a motorcycle class back in Oregon. Our instructor let us know that, sometimes, when we get into trouble, the thing to do is not to hit the breaks but hit the gas. He said when the bike begins to feel unstable, we should pick a safe place in the distance, point our front wheel toward it and roll back the throttle. It’s true the additional thrust will often stabilize the bike.

*Photo by Boudewijn Berends, creative commons

That lesson hit home recently when a friend and I were having some relational trouble. It wasn’t the sort of stuff you could sit and think through, nothing really to solve, just some fear and confusion. Instead of trying to dissect it, I just hit the gas. I called and asked if we could get together to work on a project for a day. By the end of the day, we’d forgotten whatever tension we’d been experiencing because the context had changed.

It also works in your career.

Hitting the gas might look like coming up with all new goals or better, choosing an existing goal and knocking it out. Sometimes we get so entangled with making plans, arguing with coworkers or just feeling overwhelmed we forget that taking action is often the way out of tension.

So, what do you need to take action on? If you’re in tension, could you hit the gas and speed out of it?

What would stabilize in your career and relationships if you picked a point on the horizon and rolled back the throttle?

What If The Answer To Your Problem Is To Hit the Gas is a post from: Storyline Blog