A Different Approach to New Year’s Day

I started writing this article earlier and when I was about halfway finished, I decided that I really didn’t like the direction the article was going. It sounded like probably millions of other articles do this time of year, and I didn’t like that. It made think about all the times we get to the start of a new year, and we all look back on everything that happened the year before and we decide that we need to be better people in some way shape or form. Lots of people look at the relationships in their life and they decide that they want to improve them in some way and so they make some decisions on what they can do to be a better significant other, friend or co-worker. Lots of people make the decision that they want to talk less and listen more. Other people decide that they need to start letting other people have influence on decisions or at least the decision-making process. On the surface I’m sure those things sound fine. But, as I was deleting the previous article and trying to find a way to start over, something came to me. What if at some point in our lives we need to do the opposite of what we have always done? Let’s say hypothetically that you wake up one year and you decide that over the last few years you have done a lot of listening and you have let other people help make decisions, but you still aren’t happy with where you are? What happens when you look back and you feel like you wasted a lot of time trying to hear opinions when the subject was your specialty. What happens if we take a few subjects that we know about and we decide that when it comes to these topics, we are no longer going to waste time listening to a group of people try and discuss the best course of action? Instead, what if we just said, this is what we are going to do and we need to move forward with it right away! What about when certain topics come up, instead of letting people talk about things they don’t really know about because we want to be polite, what if we controlled the conversation. What if we only had thirty minutes to talk about the subject, instead of waiting for four or five other people to talk, what if we just talked for the first twenty minutes? I want to be clear; I’m not promoting being a jerk or to stop listening to people. What I am really saying is that we have people around us who are experts on certain subjects and sometimes we don’t have a lot of time for discussion. When those times happen, we need to make the right decision and give that person the floor to speak.  As hard as it might be, sometimes that person is you. Sometimes you need to stick up for yourself and start talking. Sometimes you need to not be patient. A lot of times we have extra time to learn or listen to different ideas, when we have that time, good, take advantage of it. When you don’t have time, don’t try to hide it. Be proud of your title or the time that you have spent becoming an expert on that subject and get things figured out. It seems like over the last five years or so it’s become popular to bash on meetings and talk about what a waste of time they are. I think what we should be doing is just making sure that we are having productive meetings. A five-minute meeting by the water cooler can be a game changer if the right person is talking or making decisions. I think for the new year, my goal is going to talk more and treat my time more valuable. I want others to do the same, including my co-workers. If it isn’t my area of expertise, then tell me to shut up. We have too many experts who are being polite. We need to get the wrong people to stop talking and get the right people to start telling us what to do. It will be very uncomfortable at first, but when everyone starts seeing success, no one will mind.