Being Ready

A great thing happened over the weekend - my oldest daughter, Emma, who is five, just learned how to ride her bicycle without the use of training wheels.

For what seemed to be the longest time, she would only ride her bike with the training wheels attached. On Saturday, she decided she was ready.

We started off with me holding her seat and running behind her steadying her as she peddled. As you can imagine, that got tiring pretty quickly.

She wasn’t getting it, but was determined to ride the bike on her own. So we determined that her biggest obstacle was her balance - she had no sense of balance on the bike. I did a short exercise with her on her bike to help establish a sense of balance. This worked great. We started off and before I knew it, Emma was peddling away on her own.

This was a great moment of pride for me - something I’ll always remember - a real “daddy/daughter” moment.

I tell you this story because I think there is a great wisdom that we can all learn from my five year old. Before this weekend, any time we had urged Emma to attempt to ride her bike without training wheels, she’d find a way to get out of trying. Or if we did try - it didn’t go so well.

Yet, when we didn’t bug her to try and she determined she was ready - we experienced a great success.

See, you can’t force someone to try something new. If you get them to do what you want them to do - it will be half-hearted at best.

I had always heard that the biggest challenge that any entrepreneur and/or sales person has is getting someone to volunteer to change. That is so true.

When someone is ready to ride a bike, buy a product, or use a service, they are ready. That’s when they will give it their all, go all-out, etc. Forcing the issue before someone is ready is a recipe for disaster and a lot of wasted emotion and energy.

Does that mean you shouldn’t attempt to bring change to the status quo - not at all. Just realize that you probably won’t get many volunteers the first several times you try. But also realize that once someone gets on board with what you want to change - look out - the possibilities are endless.

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