From One Child to Two, from Small Challenges to Great Opportunities 

This past Sunday evening night I had an interesting realization. 

 My husband and I were in the kitchen with our 7 month old son. Our older 4 year old son was at the first night of our church’s Vacation Bible School.  It was the first time we had ever dropped him off at an event without staying there with him.   

I was washing up a few dishes while my husband fed our younger son. We were able to have a conversation together and I was able to complete a few household tasks.  

It felt simple and quiet.    

I had a sudden memory of “Wow, this must have been what it felt like before our second son was born when we only had one young son!”  

It was just so easy now to have only 1 child to take care of.  Most nights we run around trying to care for them both while the house is a disaster. 1 child – Soo easy!  

But then I remembered that back when we had only one son, I don’t remember thinking that it was easy.   

I remember thinking it was HARD.  I remember being tired and overwhelmed.   

So, what had changed?   

And to take it back even further, I remember that before I was a mom that I would get stressed.  Now I think “How could I have been stressed?  I only had myself to take care of!” 

I think it is because we grow as people and our capabilities expand.  Now that we have two sons, one feels easy, but two sons feel hard.  I imagine if we had 3 or 4 children, 2 would feel “easy”! 

This happens in our businesses too.

In the beginning, a small sale seems like a big deal.  Then, after 2 or 3 years, those early sales numbers are no big event. Or, we had problems in the beginning that we didn’t know how to solve and lost sleep over them.  Now we solve problems like that every day and just wish our challenges were as easy as they were in the beginning.  

To follow this growth, one of my favorite things to do is write a journal and do quarterly reflections. In following the Traction EOS system roughly, I do a quarterly review of accomplishments, challenges, and goals. I write these down in an ongoing document. In reading back to my beginning days, I listed challenges like needing to get a website, writing a company handbook and getting the proper insurance in place.  Now, those things are a distant memory as I turn our company towards integrating Artificial Intelligence, beefing up our cybersecurity polices and fine tuning our client services.  

Our ability to expand as humans is phenomenal. This reassures me that what is challenging now, won’t be challenging to me next year. And, as an optimist, what I think are amazing opportunities now, won’t be half the size of the good things that I will experience 5 years from now.

Life is truly good.