“All great beginnings start in the dark, when the moon greets you to a new day at midnight.” Shannon L. Alder

The Rearview Mirror

New beginnings!  They’re always exciting.  New beginnings allow for new adventures, new direction, and new relationships.  New beginnings usually start with a high level of anticipation for what is coming and an equal level of excitement as we move into the future.  The old is gone and the new is here!  New beginnings allow for a new and fresh perspective.  While nobody can re-write a closed chapter in life, everyone can certainly write a new chapter in their story of life.

In making a new beginning it is important to glance back and understand where one has come from, but looking back for too long is a certain recipe for disaster.  Its important to know the past, but you can’t live there.  Understanding where you were is a significant part of setting a new course.  If you don’t understand where you’ve been its very easy to go back to where you don’t want to be.

The Windshield

The other part of a new beginning is getting a clear view of where you want to go.  Just like understanding where you’ve been so you don’t unintentionally go back, not having a proper view of where you need to go ensures you’ll never get there.  There’s a reason cars are equipped with mirrors and windows. Rearview mirrors are great for helping you see where you’ve been and serve as a tool to reduce the likelihood of backing into, or over, something. Opposite of the rearview mirror, a car’s windshield allows you to see where we are going and helps to keep us on course and avoid getting into an accident along the way.

Proper Perspective

Whether its looking back on your life or looking forward to your future, both provide an opportunity to give you perspective.  Your past may be riddled with mistakes that knocked you down, but the they do not have to define your future.  As leaders everyone of us have made mistakes.  Some of them may be big and others not so much.  Having a proper perspective on the mistake allows you to set a plan to move forward and come out of the hole you found yourself in.  The mistake only defines you when you allow it to.  Its not how you fell down that most people care about, it’s how you got up that they want to see.

Coming Out Of The Valley

How you come out of the valley you are in establishes a foundation for you moving forward.  While there are some people who want to see other people fail, the majority of people love to root for a comeback story.  Your ability to come out of a valley gives you a high degree of credibility among those around you when its done well.  Falling down and effectively getting up allows people to see that you are human just like them.  The authenticity you exhibit in walking the road out of the valley allows others to believe in you.  It allows them to see that they can recover from their own valleys.  How you recover gives others hope.

Five keys to gaining perspective

1.     Get yourself up on the balcony so you can see the entire picture.

2.     Understanding yourself at the most basic level.  What causes you to think and react the way you do?

3.     Find others who you trust to give you good counsel.  In the valley you may not be in a condition to make the best decisions.

4.     Do the next right thing.  When coming out of a valley you won’t get to the mountain top overnight.  The ride down is faster that the climb up.

5.     Celebrate your victories.  Building a new foundation can only be done one block at a time.

While making a mistake as a leader is never an enjoyable experience, having a proper perspective can help to alleviate the anxiety that comes from having made the mistake.  Once the mistake is made, the shame of having made the mistake goes away quickly.  That is as long as you deal with the mistake in an authentic manner and don’t try to shift the blame to someone or something else.

“The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.” ― Arnold Bennett