BR#16: A Privilege We All Share

This week, I want to take the opportunity to highlight something that I’m very grateful for. 

Consider it a kind reminder that this is a privilege we all share and sometimes take for granted. 

For a long time, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with open-minded, intelligent people who’ve been willing to share their views on the endless topics that I wanted to discuss.

I was thinking about this earlier today after getting some great advice from someone I work with. This is quite a privilege to have, isn’t it? 

To always be able to consult with peers whose opinions we respect and value, who have different skills, different experiences, and different perspectives to our own.

We all inevitably have people around us, at work or in our lives, whom we can consult about the different situations that we find ourselves in.

I can’t tell you how many of my good decisions I owe to simply having shared my thinking with peers and then gauged their responses. We don’t always have to agree, but simply getting out of our heads and looking at things from someone else’s perspective can go such a long way.

It’s a really important thing to do frequently and purposefully because we can never guess what we don’t know.

Everything that “makes sense” to us now will continue to make sense until life proves us wrong. Rather than only learning from mistakes (i.e. when life proves us wrong), it’s so so helpful to discuss our thinking with people who can offer us a different perspective.

I have regular calls in my calendar where this is my key objective. To go over my thinking and stress-test the decisions that I’m considering. I can attribute so many good decisions to doing this, and plenty of bad decisions avoided.

Asking for feedback shouldn’t just happen when it’s required for a project to move forward. It should be a priority on a regular basis.