Is there a beast lurking in your office?
Ten bucks says you have a few of those long, put-off projects that you swear you’ll get to someday. Everyone has at least one. Even me.
I used to call these dreadful projects ”beasts” because they tend to be ugly in appearance and – bottom line – we’re afraid to tackle them. That box of mish-mashed cables that needs matched up to their owners, that shoebox with nine months of business receipts that needs to be categorized for Quickbooks, the messy garage, the box of stuff from your previous office that never got unpacked, etc.
When working with a client recently, it became clear that her beast was an overflowing binder with a huge collection of various exercises, ripped from different health and fitness magazines. A Personal Trainer, she’d been collecting these clippings over the past five years. As we were making great progress on organizing her office, this “beast” was getting louder, uglier and harder to ignore.
Although we were creating order in her office and making progress at a very good pace, this “beast” was lingering around in the background, sucking up my client’s mental and emotional energy.
I quickly realized that having the two of us refer to that pile as a beast was not helping the situation. The mere term “beast” is a bit imposing, and our repeated use of the phrase was giving power to her unwieldy project.
So I suggested that we use a different term for it. Was there something we could call it that would be less scary? So that we could begin to see the unwieldy project as something less intimidating than it was feeling to her at that moment.
She named it “Shrek”.
Such a perfect – and much friendlier – way to view the beast! Changing its name allowed her to coexist with her project and not be intimidated by its “in process” status.
Sure, ideally you’d slay your beast immediately and be done with it. But as you are well aware, that’s not always possible. If you know you’re not going to get that shoebox of receipts organized right away, there’s no sense in allowing it to scare you as it lurks in the background, sapping your energy and creating feelings of guilt. Just make peace with it – as my client did with Shrek – and it’ll lose its power over you.
What’s your Shrek? Is it truly a beast, or have you just turned it into one? Do tell!
