Darren noticed a crack in my windshield this week.

It’s on the passenger side, down in the lower corner, in a place I am apparently not looking at very often because I had not even noticed it. Once he pointed it out, though, there it was. Definitely a crack.

And now, of course, I see it every single time I get in the car. But I missed it for who knows how long. 

I started thinking about all the things in my own actual life that have probably been sitting there in the lower passenger-side corner, visible but outside my usual line of sight. I came up with a few:

• a friendship that has started feeling one-sided
• a routine that drains me every single time
• a little resentment I keep stepping around
• a task I keep avoiding because there is actually a decision underneath it
• a spiritual study practice that has gone a little flat
• a consistent and recurring pain I keep dismissing

The signals in our lives can be quieter than a cracked windshield or a check engine light, but they still tell us something about our relationships, our energy, our routines, our work, our faith, our connections, our confidence, or our stress.

Those signals are useful information.

If you have been around here for a while, you may remember my youngest sister, Jeri, because I have mentioned her and her Enneagram 3 personality before. She is very good at seeing what could work better and then wanting to figure out what to DO about it.

In her professional life, she has spent the last 25 years working inside organizations and paying attention to what is actually going on inside them.

And one of the things she says is that big organizational problems inside a company most often give signals first – people pointing fingers here, a missed handoff there, a problem that keeps coming back, something that just feels unnecessarily hard.

The clues are usually there.

So how do we pay better attention to the clues we’re seeing in our own lives? 

We ask ourselves questions, and LISTEN to the answers.

Things like:

• What do I keep putting off?
• What conversation keeps resurfacing in my head?
• Where do I feel a little knot of dread?
• What leaves me feeling weighted down?
• What keeps getting harder than it should?
• What do I complain about over and over?
• Where am I consistently overexplaining, avoiding, or bracing?
• What am I doing that seems to be adding to the problem?
• What has quietly stopped working?
• What tiny problem keeps returning?

We may not need to make some giant change because of what we find. We might just need a conversation. A limit. More information. More rest. A different plan. A little help. Or maybe we simply need to admit that the crack in the windshield is actually there. (Gosh Dangit!!)

I can’t wait to see what becomes clearer when you start noticing the signals around you. And if you need help figuring out what those signals might be telling you, I’d love to help.

PS I don’t often use this space for promotion. But Jeri has turned those 25 years of noticing organizational signals into a book. Manage for Good: Signals of Impact by Jeri Larsen comes out next week. It includes 40 real-world red flags to notice and the layout is brilliant. I am so proud of her.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

PPS If you liked this post – or any others, I’d love you to pass me and my work on to a friend.  They can find out much more about me here if they’re interested!