Right in front of you
Seeing the big picture is a difficult task sometimes. Especially when it is staring you in the face.
We get busy. There’s school, work, soccer practice, dance rehearsal, dentist appointments, and maybe a date night here and there. There are always dishes. Always laundry. The stress. The anxiety. Life comes at you fast.
All the while, you’re trying to progress. You want to advance, level up, and create a better life for your family. So, you give 100% and then some. Late nights. Early mornings. Keeping up with trends and the next big thing. Trying to stay ahead of the curve. Trying to get ahead.
For years, I’ve been a student of leadership. I’ve spent many hours reading every article and book I could get my hands on to “level up” and accelerate my personal development. I’ve got a library of self-made, self-help, and self-assured. My email inbox was once flooded each morning with blog feeds and newsletters about communication, innovation, leadership, and success.
Not long into this journey, though, I learned something. All this consumption is meaningless without doing the actual work itself. It’s in the work where we learn to apply what we’ve learned. Through the work, the lessons are internalized. Through the work, the things we truly know are revealed.
Many times, we set off in search of answers that were there all along. We overlook them time and again until one day, a day when we have our sleeves rolled up and our hands dirty, it finally clicks. That is when we realize what we are looking for has been right in front of us the whole time.
A few years ago, I met the late Jonathan Sandys. Sandys was an author, public speaker, and leadership coach of sorts, but he was also Winston Churchill’s great-grandson. He was speaking at the local Rotary Club one Tuesday afternoon, and I had slipped away from the office for a quick lunch meeting.
His talk offered a new perspective on the life and leadership of the wartime Prime Minister.
Though history considers Churchill to have been agnostic, his great-grandson argued that such a life is inexplicable without acknowledging a divine hand to guide the events as history tells us they happened.
Many historians paint a picture of a secular Churchill, calling him an agnostic or an atheist. Sandys argued otherwise that his great-grandfather was a man of faith. Sandys believed wholeheartedly that Churchill’s successes, time and time again, were only possible because of divine intervention.
I stayed after for a few minutes to get in line and buy a copy of his book. I was treated to a conversation about how the search for faith in his great-grandfather’s life presented him with his own realization. He told me how decades of searching came to a close when we embraced what he knew all along.
“I was frustrated,” said Sandys. “At that time, I was as far from God as I could be. For years I had tried to break through as a public speaker.
“People told me I needed to write a book. They told me to write about Churchill, anything, and it would get picked up. So, I looked at the themes of my great-grandfather’s life that hadn’t been touched on, and it led me to his faith. Through the research and studying his faith, I found God again,” he said.
Sandys’ book “God & Churchill” details the relationship between one of modern history’s greatest heroes and a higher power that guided him.
“Originally the book was to be called Churchill & God,” said Sandys. “The book was about my great-grandfather, God was irrelevant. The book was to be about Churchill working to end a war that God should have never let happen.”
Instead, Sandys said the research revealed to him that God used Churchill at a certain point in history to prove a point, to offer hope to the world.
Which brings me back to my original point.
After struggling for years to understand something, Sandys found the answer had been staring him straight in the eye the whole time.
His breakthrough came from what he already knew.
Each of us experiences similar roadblocks daily. Whether it’s a problem we’re trying to solve at the office, a decision to be made at home, or something as simple as deciding on a gift for someone we love, we all make choices that are seemingly difficult.
The next time you find yourself stumped take a page from Sandys’ book. Get busy doing the work. Then take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
Whatever it is, the answer is probably right in front of you.
I took last week off and didn’t put a post together for The Blind Copy. I’m teaching adjunct at my alma mater and used the time I would normally write to get my class syllabus finalized and the first few weeks of content lined out. The cool thing about writing for yourself, instead of being on-deadline for a publication you don’t own, is that you can take time off or miss a week without the pressure from on high. :)