Don’t Tackle Problems Head-on

A massive rock recently rolled down the mountain and landed smack dab in the middle of the horse trail that my dad and I built a few years ago. We feared it would wreck the trail we had spent so much time on, removing thousands of rocks to create a smooth trail down the canyon. The hundreds of visitors we had taken loved it. We invested ridiculous time and energy trying to move the rock, but it just wouldn’t budge.

Abraham Lincoln faced an obstacle that risked distracting him from his goals of preserving the Union and ending slavery.  Here is how he described his plan for dealing with it to a reporter. “When I was a boy on the farm in Illinois, there was a great deal of timber on the farms which we had to clear away. Occasionally, we would come to a log that had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn, and too heavy to move, so we plowed around it.”

If the obstacle you are facing truly must be addressed to achieve the goal, then tackle it head-on. But in my coaching, I often find that leaders become so obsessed with overcoming a challenge that they lose sight of their ultimate goal. Sometimes, they should just “plow around it” and keep moving forward. That’s what we finally did with our trail. It might’ve added a few seconds to the ride, but it still gets us where we’re bound, safe, and sound.