What are you watching for?

What are you watching for in your work and relationships with people?

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Are you watching for what the people around you are doing right?  Or are you watching for what they are doing wrong?  There is a difference, and it has a huge impact on us and on our relationships with others.  In our professional lives, we are frequently conditioned to focus on the problems, on the things that go wrong, on the mistakes people make, and on the flaws in the processes and systems that we are responsible for.  This focus becomes a pattern over time, and eventually, can become who we are.  So, we find ourselves turning everything in our lives into a problem to be solved, a mistake to be fixed and a flaw to be corrected.  Eventually, after suffering through this a few times, our friends become distant, unavailable, and our employees “check out”.  Who really wants to be somebody’s problem to be solved?!  

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Perhaps instead, we could focus on what is going well, on what people are doing right, and on systems that largely work.  Yes, there will be mistakes, problems and flaws, but that is not what matters most.  What matters is what is going well, and the relationships that we have with those around us.