Hitting the Piano Keys Harder Won’t Make It Sound Better — Only Louder

Have you ever misplaced your energies? Like doing something harder when a more appropriate solution was to do something different?

Doing something different, rather than putting more effort into the same action, is about zooming out and asking yourself, 'What's really going on?'

Knowing that a zoom-out is needed takes:

• Education: if we don't know that a piano can be tuned, we will not even consider it, because we don't know what we don't know.

• Competence: if you don't know how to tune it, it may be worse off than before.

• Evaluation: to see whether your efforts brought the desired results.

Here are a few areas where it makes sense, from obvious to not so, but just as appropriate:

• When a piano gets out of tune, you don't hit it harder to play better. You do something different.

• When a car is stuck in the mud, you don't just keep hitting the gas pedal. You combine pressing the gas with other actions.

• When work gets too much, you don't just blindly work longer and longer hours. You delegate, request and/or manage expectations around priorities, volume and timeline.

• When you want to rebuild your confidence, you don't wait for confidence to come. Confidence is the goal, not the pathway.

• When your kids don't understand you, raising your voice doesn't necessarily increase their understanding.

• When your team doesn't agree with you, disagreeing harder can bring you to a dead end or silent sabotage. You master agreeing/disagreeing and combine it with other elements. You may want to move to a more advanced version - alignment, while keeping disagreements.

And so on...

See if you can bring your own example here... And use these questions to ponder:

• When you're demotivated, do you only look for motivation?

• When you are down, do you only look for ways to go up? Or do you look at paths to the side?

• When you don't get the results you want... what strategy do you use: push, try again, recalibrate, change, reassess?

There are many options available to us to improve our playing of the instrument we chose, whether it's being a colleague, an executive leader, a parent, a partner or simply a human.

Pausing to ask "What's the most suitable option out of X?" can be extremely valuable.

They say that Kandinsky had 40 shades of green to paint with. Not just one, or two, or three greens. Forty. Mastering anything means you should work on having a range of options at your disposal, so that you can choose what's most appropriate. A range of responses. A range of behaviours. A range of beliefs and internal meaning-making options. When you do, "I got a push back from the board" expands from only meaning "I may be soon out of my job" to:

• "They could be right - I did miss an important aspect in my presentation."

• "I think I was right, but my articulation of my point wasn't clear enough."

• "How can I learn from this experience to prepare better next time?" Etc.

So, as I wrote elsewhere and often say to my clients: expand your range. Have fun expanding yours.