Don’t be a Chicken: 6 Ways to Know You’re Not Seeing Clearly
A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in the nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked. “That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.” So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was. ~Anthony de Mello, Jesuit Priest
So how do we step out of what we think we are and what we think we know to embrace the eagle of potential inside? The first step is noticing when you’re not seeing clearly; to keep with the metaphor, noticing when you’re thinking like a chicken when you might be an eagle. We have to see it before we can do anything about it, right? And there are 6 warning signs that you’re not seeing yourself, another, or anything else clearly.
When it’s overly emotional. If you’re a human, you have emotions. Emotions are incredible, but when those emotions take over — anger, fear, sadness — pick your favorite — it should be a big red flag calling your attention to the fact that whatever you’re overly emotional about probably isn’t as it seems.
When your feelings don’t match your words. When you respond with “I’m fine” but you’re devastated inside. When you say “no problem” but for you it’s really a problem. When you feel like you’re acting out a façade and deep down you’re not actually even sure how you feel. I’m not advocating for inappropriate emotional outbursts (see point 1), but telling the truth (at least to yourself) about how you feel is important to recognize who you really are.
When the goals you speak don’t match your results (or your actions). “I want to start a business.” but you don’t do anything about it. “I’m going to lose weight!” and yet the strict diet and the gym attendance falls off within a couple of weeks. There’s something deeper that you really want and when you stop denying it and address it, you’ll see your actions will start to align with what you say you want to do.
When you’re always right (and never wrong). Every single person is wrong sometimes. Every single one. James Bond spoke the words penned by Ian Fleming: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” That enemy, in this case, is you. If you’re not practiced at being wrong, it can be painful to deal with, especially if it’s in any kind of public setting. Just as the eagle wasn’t willing to admit he was living wrongly as a chicken, he was always stuck living as a chicken.
When you over-generalize. Very rarely are things all or nothing — there’s something in between. When clients will never buy, when he/she will never understand, when I always seem to…. It’s easy to dismiss things that are all or nothing, but all are traps of overgeneralizing to avoid the effort to see clearly.
When you’re resigned. Resignation is the submission to what is an undesirable but seemingly inevitable outcome, denying that you can do anything about it. A lot of things happen in the world that are out of our control. The pandemic. The weather. The latest happening on Wall Street or with the Bitcoin prices (unless you’re Elon Musk and drive Bitcoin price changes with a tweet). It might look like there’s nothing to be done. And you’re right, you can’t snap your fingers and solve the pandemic, make the sun come out, or magically have a client sign your agreement. BUT resigning yourself to the idea that “there’s nothing you can do” is resigning yourself to not seeing clearly. Yes, the pandemic shut down your business, but what can you do while the doors are physically shut? Ok, Bitcoin plunged again, what is there to do about it for your business and your life? Just because things happen out of our control does not mean that everything is out of control.
Working through these 6 warning signs, you might find things that you don’t like and require time to adjust. It’s those that are brave enough to do it that end up making meaningful differences for themselves, their businesses, or even the world.
Tell me what other warning signs you look for to see clearly in your own business or life in the #NoMatterWhat Community on Facebook. Are there any other key indicators you use? And what do you do when you find them?
Seeing clearly, or at least trying to see clearly, can be one of the hardest and most difficult things that we will ever do (if you choose to do it at all). But try this on for a cheesy ending. If you’re willing to go through the discomfort of noticing, take a chance to step back to see what’s really there, you’ll be set up to stop living like a chicken and take flight like an eagle.