Rise and Shine

Always have options

For the last seven months, I have been an active member of a social football team, as part of personal physical fitness plan. We play games against other social football teams every Saturday. It is a good way to relax, work the body out and get to counter any possible stress that may build up during the busy week days.

We play against many teams in Blantyre, including National Bank, Reserve Bank, Polytechnic, Universal Industries, Escom Socials, Ndirande Flats, Chinyonga Football Club and many more. I have noticed that each team has its own style and they even have their own ways of communication. One of these teams has one regular phrase they like to shout to players near the team member who has the ball. “Give him options!” This is often said when the member holding the ball is tightly marked and has almost no space for escape. The ‘coach’ will shout ‘Give him options’ to the other players so that they can create a few different options from which the player holding the ball can choose to exploit so that they keep holding the ball and push forward in order to score and possibly win the game.

I found this simple statement to be very wise and effective. Often times, the other team members do indeed come near the one holding the ball and they create a few options for him to pass the ball to and in the process, they make the marking by the opposing team look less effective. I learnt one big lesson from this repeated experience. Once you have many options, even a big problem becomes easy to solve.

The trouble is that many times, we find ourselves in situations where we face big problems without any options at hand. We get surprised when others escape from similar or even bigger problems. But usually, the difference is that the other people have options at hand to choose from for the escape route. If we have no options for escape, we will remain stuck and cannot at all solve the big problem in our face.

Therefore, if you want to avoid the frustrating situation where you are faced with a big problem and without any possible solution in sight, you need to constantly create multiple options for yourself. For a career, as an example, make sure that you have two or three options of what you would do if you were to, unfortunately, find yourself in a situation where you have to part ways with your employer. If you are a very successful person, it means that you currently and always hold the best job fitting you at that time. And so, it is unlikely that you would escape from your job, or your business and find something similar or better. But that too does still happen sometimes. Either way, make sure that you do have possible escape routes all the time.

You will not create different options over one night. It takes time, a lot of hard work and above everything else, it takes a lot of networking and building a reputation of a great performer. If you stand out in what you do, you are well networked and you thrive at any responsibility you are assigned, you should not worry much about having options because by default, you will have created many options for yourself.

Good luck as you create options for yourself so that you eliminate the dreadful event where you could potentially be stuck between a rock and a hard place without any possible escape routes. All the best as you plan to rise and shine!

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