Squirrels always get their nuts!! (A lesson in motivation)
I grew up alongside our local park and our back garden was always heavily overhung with chestnut trees and oak trees. As you can imagine this was great for a young kid, as every autumn there was always a huge supply of conkers to thread and play with.
However, my dad wasn’t quite as keen because it always attracted numerous squirrels!
As everyone knows squirrels really like nuts, especially squirrels, and the squirrels that lived in the trees around us were no exception.
Now my dad is a pretty good guy and it’s not that he begrudged the squirrels the nuts that fell in our garden. What he didn’t like was they way they didn’t discriminate. Those squirrels knew what they wanted and they were very very clear it was nuts they wanted and they weren’t overly bothered whose nuts they were.
For most of the year there weren’t enough nuts falling from the trees and that mean’s these squirrels got creative!
The squirrels didn’t seem to recognise my dad’s objections, that he’d put the nuts out for the birds; they were going to have their nuts. If that meant stealing the nuts my day had put out for the birds then that was just fine with them!
And that my friend is where the fun really started because like me, my dad wasn’t going to give in easy.
If the squirrels were going to steal the nuts from the bird table, then he’d buy a feeder.
All to soon the nuts were hanging in a bag from the cloths line. The next day, they were on the floor as the squirrels ran along the line chewed through the bag and deposited the nuts on the floor!
No problem, my dad tried increasingly complex devices on the line to stop the squirrels getting to the nuts, each time they got past and always got the nuts.
Then one day it was just too tough, so the squirrels chewed through the line and deposited the nuts and bag on the floor!
Wire protected line, no problem the squirrels leap huge distances and catch the line side on - amazing!
No matter what my dad did, those squirrels knew what they wanted and they weren’t going to let my dad get in the way.
Throughout this whole summer my dad got more frustrated and more frustrated, we got more and more amused watching my dad try new things and the squirrels always getting “their” nuts!
Then one day something changed, my dad stopped getting frustrated and began to enjoy the game, we thought he’d just given in :o)
Though looking back as a coach and speaking to you as someone who understands the value of learning can imagine what I learned from these events as you consider what you can learn from this?
Years later I asked him what had changed and the said:
“Somehow, I began to really respect those squirrels, they were very clear what they wanted, and they were incredibly inventive and flexible.”
“Imagine how much we could achieve if we lived our lives like that?”
“Food for thought” as they say,
Have fun,
Anth.
