Who is Calling You?

We all feel stranded sometimes, stuck if you will by the circumstances of the day. We have to make a difficult decision or step out and do something risky, and we feel a bit lost at sea in those moments. But what if that wasn’t just a feeling? What if one afternoon, you found yourself afloat in an ocean without end and a boat without rescue? What then?

That’s what one group of people found one afternoon in Europe. They were off course. They had floated further and faster than they had anticipated. They were lost, stranded in an endless sea with land and hope long forgotten. So they did what everyone would have done, they contacted the Coast Guard.

As fate would have it, they couldn’t get through. The call wasn’t answered, the line never connected and the waves kept coming. What now? What would you have done in that moment? Who would you have called?

It’s an interesting exercise, but one group of people, it was more than an exercise, it was a life or death situation. So who did they call? Their travel agent.

Go ahead and read that last sentence again, because it’s unbelievable. Trapped on a boat, lost without imminent rescue, they called their travel agent. Why? Because they didn’t have an ordinary travel agent, they had a Travel Counsellor. Renowned the world, and ocean, over for their service, the Travel Counsellor sprung into action. They alerted the authorities and helped rescues the stranded boat. Crisis averted.

If you’re a leader, you can’t hear that story without thinking, “Would they have called me? In that situation, would the boat have trusted me or my company to help? What does it take to have a relationship like that?”

Those are great questions to wrestle with, and as we discuss them this year, I want to remind you of one thing – start small. In our quest to be greater leaders or raise stronger families or lead better companies, we sometimes get lost thinking about the rescue phone calls. Instead, I think we need to focus on the day to day, seemingly small decisions.

Was I kind today to people who were not kind to me? Did I operate from my strengths? Did I make it easy for a customer to tell me they were unhappy with something? Did I go the second mile when the first mile was all that was expected?

These are always the kind of questions we need to ask and answer long before we’ll get a call from the middle of the ocean. And as we do, each day, we’ll get better at both the little things and the big rescues we’ll all face as leaders.

This post is categorized Lead