Have you ever been out walking and got a pebble in your shoe? If you are like me… you probably don’t stop and deal with it right away. You kick your foot or shake it figuring ‘it will move the pebble and that little irritation will go away’ or you just figure you are almost where you need to be and when you stop you will dump it out. It irritates but is not going to kill you… so you let it be and “live with it”. But in reality, it just continues to be an irritation. I have a friend – and this story is really true – he had an irritation in the bottom of his foot. He ignored it and ignored it. It festered and grew and grew. Withing a few months he was in hospital. His leg was amputated from the knee down.
In all our lives we have those little irritants that we “don’t deal with”. In the sponsorship world it might be that person you work with. It might be your boss. It might be that client that is always asking for more or that prospect that you have been prospecting for years and they keep leading you on and never sign a deal… but they insist it is still coming. It could be the operations folks who just don’t understand sponsorship and need to get their “sh$t” together. None of these things are going to affect your budget or your overall success you think, so like the pebble in the shoe, we ignore the little issues and irritations and motor on.
But if we don’t deal with these issues, the “pebbles”, they will grow. They will fester and yes, they will affect your success. They will create bigger problems than you can imagine. I have experienced this. I left a job once because that “little irritant” (a tyrant General Sales Manager that was fired a few years later) got too much. It was an awful work environment, and I did nothing about for 2 years. And I have had those clients that I should have dropped, those team members that I should have dealt with, but never did.
Too often we carry these little irritations because they seem too small to matter. The habit that wears a slow groove in our days. The grudge we hold and cannot even remember what it was for. That’s the trouble with the “small stuff”… the grudges, the bad habits, the tiny cruelties – they seem too little to matter until they have worn a hole clean through you.
The path to success comes in noticing these little pebbles, stopping and emptying your shoe. I hope your walks are pebble free or at least only exist for a short distance before you shake that pebble out and the irritation is gone… not matter how small it is.
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