The rain was torrential. You could barely see the brake lights of the car in front of you. I began to wonder whether I should pull over and wait it out. Then I remembered to put on my hazard lights so the car behind me would be able to see me better. I was wishing the car in front of me would do it as well but I noticed I was the only one on the road who had turned them on.
I had been taught to do this when I was sixteen years old and today I am forty-eight. I guess it kind of stuck with me. It got me thinking, “do I always play it safe and do the right thing?” In this particular situation, it was the perfect thing to do because I prefer not getting into accidents that can be avoided. But what about other times in my life?
I got married when I was thirty, a risk considering our history together, got divorced, and left a well-paying corporate job to start my own company. When I first started my company I took big risks, didn’t play it safe and amazing things happened. As the business grew, I took less risks, stuck with the status quo and the business plateaued and began to drop off.
Rather than give in to what I perceived as a failure, I asked myself, is this where I want to stop? What could I do different if I started again? What do I need to have/do to go beyond the success I had achieved before? I re-staffed, took on a partner, created new methods for doing things, found new vendor partners, more customers and it paid off big time. Basically, I took a risk and didn’t play it safe.
Then I got comfortable, played it safe and bam, business began to fall off. I am sensing a trend here. How about you?
What I see when I review my life is that when I take risks while doing the right thing it is really the safe thing to do because it works in a positive way for me. But, if I do the safe thing while doing the right thing I am not stepping outside my comfort zone enough to affect positive change. God created us for God-sized works so I need to keep driving in the rain with my hazards on because they keep me moving forward in the right direction, in a safe way, in a risky situation while telling the world, “stay back, Laura’s ahead!
Are you driving with your hazards? Is it working? Tell me your story. Post your comments on this post.