Why Does This Keep Happening?

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results Albert Einstein

This past week, I had the opportunity to hear an old African tribal story about the tribe who lived near the river and each week they observed rafts coming down the river with lots of maimed and injured bodies. Week after week, they waded into the water, pulled the injured people out of the water, bandaged up their bodies and struggled to nurse them back to health.

This went on week after week, month after month, year after year. Finally someone in the tribe said, “Why don’t we go upstream and see what is causing injury to these bodies? If we can find the source of the problem, and fix it, then there wouldn’t be all these injured bodies and we wouldn’t have to work so hard taking care of them week after week.”

The moral of the story: fix the root of the problem, not the symptom or by-product of the problem. So often in our businesses we keep “nursing back to health” the same issues in our business over and over, week after week.

Perhaps we keep struggling with too many things on our plate. Or we struggle keeping our focus and procrastination sets in. Or maybe it’s working with clients that give us a headache from their incessant demands, week after week. Maybe we’re frustrated we don’t have enough clients or we’re not making enough money.

Whatever it is that is a struggle or challenge week after week-has a source or root to its origin that you must get fixed.

Suffering from overwhelm week after week, means there is too much on our plate and we need to remove some of it-perhaps just temporarily, but make some choices to unload a portion of it.

Lack of focus may have to do with too many distractions in our life, i.e. e-mail, social media, or experiencing what many entrepreneurs’ experience: the-next-bright-shiny-object syndrome.

And working with clients we don’t like-well, it’s clear; we haven’t created an ideal client profile, nor set up expectations with our clients, on how to work with us.

What’s showing up in your life, week after week that’s a toleration, a challenge, headache, or frustartion? Isn’t it time to head upstream to figure out the source-so it can be permanently fixed, once and for all?