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Hey it’s Andrew here from safetyontap.com
Merry Christmas! I’ve got no idea what your 2017 was like, but I do hope you have taken some time to reflect on it, maybe with the help of a few of these epsiodes. And I hope you are getting ready to make 2018 a fantastic year. I hope you have an enjoyable break with the important people in your life.
This is the last of my 2017 10 days of Christmas, the last business day of the year before Christmas. I wanted to start by saying thank you for listening, and for those of you who I’ve had contact with through the year, thanks for reaching out, I love hearing from you.
If any of you are ready to accelerate your development and your career next year, I’d love to help you as a member of Safety on Tap Connected – a year of coaching, education and community learning for less than a few coffee’s per week. Check out safetyontap.com/connected
Or if you would like me to come out to your team meeting, internal conference, workshop or strategy session to help you and your team, send me an email andrew [at] safetyontap.com
In this episode, I want to share with you a lesson from a goose. Download your free transcript and worksheet to help you take action from this episode – pop your details into the box above this text!
Some of you might have heard of the fable of the goose and the golden eggs. One day, a poor peasant farmer goes out to his farmyard and finds that his goose has laid a golden egg. He couldn’t believe his eyes, so he rushed off to the town to get it appraised. Sure enough, the goose egg was pure gold. The next day the farmer couldn’t wait to wake and check the goose nest. Again, he found a golden egg.
The peasant farmer quickly gathered wealth and each day, no quicker or slower, the goose laid one single golden egg. But the farmer grew impatient, he wanted more gold than the goose was providing, so he took his axe, and killed the goose in order to get more eggs from it’s body. He was shocked to discover there were no extra golden eggs inside that goose, and now he had killed the very thing that ensured his continued wealth and prosperity.
This ancient fable supposedly has a moral about being greedy. I take a broader lesson from it, as Stephen Covey nicely illustrates. He talked about a principle of effectiveness, in his book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, based on a balance of production, and production capability. The golden eggs were the production, the goose itself held the production capability. But to maintain it, the goose would require food, and water, and shelter and all those important things that geese need to thrive.
The goose also has a Christmas-ey undertone, especially for our Northern Hemisphere listeners who enjoy a goose roast. Have you ever felt like you cannot get to Christmas soon enough, because this time of year is when we’ve all had enough, and a nice break and some festivities will recharge us ready for another year? We’ve been flat out producing golden eggs, and we just need to look after ourselves before we get back on the egg production schedule after the holidays.
As effective professionals, we need to balance our production with our production capability – how we look after our own development, our own effectiveness. And we need to do more than just a training course, or a conference, or reading some stuff online or listening to a podcast every now and again. We need to be intentional about our own development, and we need to invest in our development as a regular activity.
Like giving the goose food and water, it works really well when it is small amounts regularly, not a year’s worth of food and water delivered all at once. The goose won’t survive like that, it definitely wont thrive and continue to produce any eggs, let alone golden ones.
My hope for you is to get far more intentional about how you maintain your production capability in 2018, and you do that continuously throughout the year. If you want to do that with me and a community of like-minded people, you might consider Safety on Tap Connected Membership.
I wish you all the best for your holidays. And I hope your 2018 is filled with positive, effective and rewarding action to feed your goose, and keep laying golden eggs all year long. Seeya!