Who are your role models? What challenges you to greatness?
Okay, easy if you’re thinking humans, but my work is about creating community with all life. I tend to draw inspiration from the world around me.
Like bald eagles. Let’s take a look.
Bald eagles regularly perch in a scraggly Madrona tree above our Alki Beach neighborhood in Seattle, benignly ignoring their oh-so-human admirers (and their many crow and gull detractors). Traffic stops, crowds gather, and those of us privileged to live here just smile. We love our eagles.
One thing that is particularly fascinating is sharing our beach with eagle generations: the mature bald eagles with the classic white heads and tails and their growing offspring, the mottled maybe-two-year-olds I call the juveniles (and perhaps the bird people call ‘immatures’).
I tend to look beyond humans for inspiration, from learning to get along to being the best person I can be, personally and professionally. For role models I look to our bald eagles: they work hard to earn a living, but they know what to concentrate on, and when. Bald eagles live their lives triumphantly, despite the occasional goof-ups.
What Challenges You to Greatness?
Who are your role models? What do you learn from them? What challenges you to greatness?
Is it the economy? We’re told it sucks and the stress is making people nuts. But what if we saw our economic quandary as an opportunity?
Think positive. Challenge our mindset. Think fresh. Think …
What in the world can we learn from a bald eagle?
Eagles get what counts: the basics. And they’re fully present in the act of being: bald eagles. Even when they goof up.
Sure, they have to get the basics: screw up in nature and you die. (True for us, too, though, isn’t it?) But somehow we just expect more from bald eagles. After all, they’re not only back from the brink of extinction but confident, strong, and sure of their place in the world.
We, however, don’t always get that bald eagles are just like us: greatness prone to goof-ups. So what does that teach us?
Learn from experience: I watched the bald eagle parents teaching their kids the aerodynamics of flying. They circled and swooped over the Alki Point Light House, the parents dipping in and around the juveniles, who’d clumsily struggle to imitate them, over and over.
Who is teaching you to fly? How hard are you working to learn? How do you measure success? Practice practice practice.
Perseverence: Out with my dogs, I watched two juveniles circling above me, barely clearing a light pole, laboring to gain altitude. They didn’t quit, even with gulls and crows diving at them. In fact, about the third circling they actually began to look graceful as they succeeded.
How do you gain altitude? What keeps you going, and learning?
I keep learning. If something isn’t working in my business, I tweak it or try something new. But I don’t forget the basics. We all have to stay afloat.
Ignore the crowd: Gulls and crows constantly harass the eagles, ganging up on them, chasing and diving at them. I’ve never seen the eagles fight back: they ignore their tormenters, even as they’re often driven off. But they always go where they want to, and they keep coming back. Recently I saw two crows harassing an eagle sitting in a fir tree across the street. Even when one crow raked its butt and knocked it off balance, the eagle simple re-balanced and adjusted its feathers, never once acknowledging the crows.
What’s chasing you? Do you know where you’re going, and why? Do you shrug off disappointments or take them out on others? What keeps you coming back? What makes you the boss, or a team player?
Excel at what you do: I noticed an osprey making off with a fish so heavy the osprey fought to hang on to it and still fly. An eagle swooped in, chasing and snatching at the osprey, trying to get it to drop the fish. The osprey dodged and kept going, until the eagle hit it hard enough it dropped the fish. The eagle snatched it mid-air and flew off.
What keeps you persevering? What makes you give up? What do you excel at? Why? What’s working for you? What’s challenging you to greatness?
Who are your role models, and why?
(c) 2012 Robyn M Fritz