Are You a Hamster 🐹 or a Chameleon 🦎?

Household chores never seem to bubble up to the top of my life backlog. I never seem to have time to cut the grass, clean the kitchen floor, prep the salad for dinner or plaster that hole in the wall. When the wait time for those mundane backlog items exceeds my wife’s patience, they get expedited with her classic guilt-ridden one-liner,

“We always have time for the things we care about…”

Why is it that there is never enough time in the day to get everything done? Reminds me of a blog post I wrote regarding a myth about time.

The point is, it isn’t really about having more time. It’s about what we do with the time we have. In addition to my wife’s cutting reminder, one of the most profound quips I’ve heard stressing this point is from Alan Weiss, author of Value-Based Fees,

“There is always time and always money because these are priorities not resources”

Alan Weiss

It’s given me a whole different perspective whenever I hear someone exclaim,

“I (/We/They) don’t have time!”

When I engage with a new client, I often hear this hopeless lament from someone in the organization whenever I suggest setting aside time to improve what they’re currently doing.

Most often from those that need it the most.

It’s as if they’re on a hamster wheel going nowhere as fast as they can. Their answer to poor performance is to run faster by pushing or trying harder. They have no time to improve but apparently lots of time for do-overs. Again and again until they attain that elusive holy grail of perfection: “flawless execution”.

A stark contrast to those who embrace a spirit of continuous improvement from the get-go. Like chameleons who change the colour of their skin to adapt to their environment, their answer to poor performance is to try something different. They realize the significance of slowing down to go faster. Always looking for ways to learn from past mistakes and failures. Perfection doesn’t exist for them. It’s something to strive for and yet never to be attained.

As a coach, I don’t get to choose my coachee’s perception of available time and/or predisposition to the need for improvement. What I can choose is how I respond to my coachee’s perceptions and predispositions. I can respond in one of three ways:

1. Carry on and make the best of a bad situation.
2. Escalate to the powers that be and ask for their support in helping my coachees prioritize time to improve.
3. Coach and dive deeper into my coachees’ world to better understand what’s really happening.

Option 1 will yield mediocre and sub-optimal results at best. Results that will not sustain themselves after I leave.

Option 2 never ends well, breaks trust with the coachees and can taint the very relationship I’m trying to nurture

Option 3 always takes more time and patience. If my priority is real lasting change for the coachees, then I can’t afford to not take the time. Doing so may reveal new insights and open up so many more possibilities and options. Options to get the coachees off their hamster wheels and behaving more like chameleons. All the while maintaining respect and trust in the coach-coachee relationship.

While I was writing this post, I managed to finally plaster a hole in my basement wall. Something I had been putting off for over 6 months. It suddenly became a priority for me. My wife quipped,

“I can’t believe you’re being a handy-man!”