People Want to Help You … Really

I have a condition called presbyopia. I’ll bet you do, too. 80% of the population between the ages of 45-55 gets it. No, it’s not a disease that only affects Presbyterians. It’s not even a disease at all. It’s a condition that is natural to aging. It’s also known as the “my arms aren’t long enough to hold this far enough away to read this, so I better buy some reading glasses” syndrome.

If you get tired of wearing those readers, you can have your presbyopia corrected by obtaining monovision contact lenses. That’s what I did. My right lens is for distance, and my left lens is for close-up (i.e., reading). In other words, when I have my contacts in, I can put my hand over my left eye and things are clear five feet or more away, but objects two feet away are blurry. Likewise, when I put my hand over my right eye, everything I see is blurry beyond about five feet, but I can see things crystal clear that are just one to two feet away.

I’ve been wearing monovision contact lenses since 2008. Every morning for the past 14 years, I’ve put the right lens in first, then the left. More specifically, here’s the process: I put on my bifocal glasses so I can see my right contact to make sure that I’m putting it in correctly – not inside out – and place it on my right eye; I then put my glasses back on for the second time to view my left contact to see if I’m putting it in properly, and do the same for my left eye.

Until this week …

This past Monday morning my wife was watching me go through my morning lens-in-the-eye process, and she asked, “Why do you put your right contact in first?” I said, “I’ve always done it this way.” She replied, “Why?” to which I responded, “I don’t know why, I just do.” She then gave me some ground-breaking advice: “If you put your left contact in first, you would only have to put your glasses on once, because if you put in your left lens – the one for closeness – first, you can then see clearly how to put the right one in without having to put your glasses back on.”

Wow! She was right. Why hadn’t I thought of that? For 14 years I’ve inserted my contact lenses with less efficiency than I could have over 5000 times. One simple observation from a bystander who was willing to speak up led to a better and more efficient process that added one more element of simplicity to my life. Since I’ve put my contacts in and taken them out thousands of times, I’m an expert at it. But that doesn’t mean I was efficient at it. There it was, a better process gaining clarity, right under my nose, or better stated, right in front of my eyes – in plain sight but unrecognizable to me.

This may seem like a trivial story, but its application is huge.

I make my living as an executive coach and business consultant. People invite me into their lives to help them improve their performance and achieve a proper work-life balance. In other words, metaphorically speaking, they invite me into their lives to help them discover that putting the left contact in first provides the most clarity, which creates capacity, efficiency, and a simpler life. At the highest level, they hire me to help them solve complex challenges and do strategic planning. At the most basic level, they engage me to point out the obvious, which is not so obvious, as I’ve previously illustrated.

The main reason I chose this career as a profession, is that I’ve learned first-hand the power of having people in my life that I invited into it to tell me the truth about myself. I hired my first executive coach in 2010. Right now I have two coaches that I’m actively working with to improve two specific core areas in my life. I also have a group of business peers that I meet with monthly, a group where we discuss challenges and opportunities and receive encouragement from each other. I have a weekly Bible study that I attend with my close friends, guys I can tell the whole truth to about what’s going on in my life.

All these people in my life, my wife included, listen to me and observe me, looking for opportunities to make suggestions that will improve my life. Whom do you have in your life that is doing this for you?

God created us for community. If it were not so, He would not have put skin on and taken the form of a human in the body of Jesus Christ. Each of us needs mentors and coaches to speak wisdom into our lives. We need peers to walk the journey with us and encourage us along the way. And we need to give and minister in the same way to others out of the blessings we have received from others.

The Apostle Paul instructs us to “encourage one another and build one another up (1 Th 5:11).” King Solomon said, “As steel sharpens steel, one friend sharpens another (Pr 27:17).” The writer of Hebrews challenges us with this: “Let’s see how inventive we can be in encouraging love and helping out, not avoiding worshiping together as some do but spurring each other on (Hb 10:24-25).”

There is a better process for gaining clarity, and it’s right under our noses, in plain sight to others, but perhaps not so much to us; people who are waiting to help us if we just invite them in. If you’re trying to do life alone, remember that a self-made man relieves God of a great responsibility. God loves us. He has provided Himself for us, and He has ordained the framework of community for which to do life. There are people nearby ready to lighten your load by suggesting that you put the left one in first. Go seek them out.

Play to win this week in the game that really counts!