Good morning,
So here is a question for you, why are we all not doing things that bring us joy? There are probably many projects in the back of our minds we would like to start but for one reason or another, haven’t.
Why are a lot of us choosing to deny ourselves these great opportunities then? Let me try and explain this using a situation you may find yourself in regarding your towns central park. Even though this green area is widely loved by your citizens, it has unfortunately not been given the love and attention it requires to keep clean and beautiful.
Through mismanagement or poor organisation, the park has unfortunately fallen into wrack and ruin. The problem is only compounded by the fact that the gardeners and landscapers now feel overwhelmed by the task and even the most experienced of your team can be reduced to jellied messes of nerves at the smallest thought of fixing the problems.
So how do you persuade your gardening team to take on the task? Well, you firstly stop asking them to eat the whole cake in one go! I like sweet things as much as the next person but I do reach my sugar limit quite quickly if ever faced with a sucrose mountain. If therefore, a massive chocolate cake was put in front of me, I would probably ask the kind baker what I had done previously to grievously offend them. Only by taking slivers out of the desert would I be able to munch my way through it… eventually.
It would still take me a long time, whichever way you made me eat it. To avoid a first class ticket to chunder town though, I would need to break down the task into smaller parts and be given enough time to complete the challenge!
So how does this relate to your towns gardening team? Even though the ultimate goal is to have the best-kept park in all the land, the most effective way to get your people motivated is to break the big task into smaller bite-sized chunks. If you ask them to complete each smaller task one after another, after a short while, you will have made major progress. Lets break it down below:
Tasks to complete in your park:
- Rake up and remove fallen leaves.
- Pick up all rubbish in the flowerbeds, on the grass and footpaths.
- Cut grass and take away clippings.
- Trim bushes and hedges and clear away clippings.
- Edge the grassy areas along the paths and flower beds.
With those five steps, we have broken down a quite formidable job into smaller tasks. Even your most junior gardeners can look at that list and feel confident enough to take it on!
Breaking down the big things in life so they are easier to take on will open up new possibilities for your life and town. In allowing ambitious tasks to become more completable, the opportunities for your dreams to bloom like one of your parks freshly pruned flowers inch ever closer.
On a side note, I realised that in this letter I was able to put a metaphor inside another metaphor – Metaph-ception if you will. I obviously like using metaphors but even this is a new one for me. Oh well, I will talk to you all again soon.
Yours sincerely,
Ryan Rose-Blanc
Rose-Blanc Town management
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