Lion or snail? 🦁🐌

I remember someone asking me a question that has stayed in my thoughts and kind of haunted me ever since...

Would you rather be chased by a lion or by an immortal snail that will kill you if it ever touches you?

The question itself actually makes me shudder 😬

It reminds me an awful lot of leadership and business ownership...

The lion is obvious.

🦁 You lose a vet you absolutely cannot afford to lose, when recruitment is already difficult and the rota barely works as it is.

🦁 Someone makes a significant clinical mistake, and suddenly you're managing the client, the vet involved, the team and your own worry about what happens next.

🦁 Something happens in your personal life that wipes out your capacity overnight, while the practice carries on needing you exactly as much as it did yesterday. 

But you deal with them because they demand to be dealt with. 

Some of the most costly problems we face as leaders aren't lions at all. They're snails.  

🐌 The team member who's mostly great, except for that one behaviour that's been niggling at you for months (and that you keep making excuses for).

🐌 The fact you haven't really had a day off in months. You're not physically at the practice, but you're still checking WhatsApp, answering questions, and keeping half an eye on what's happening.

🐌 The conversation with your business partner that you rehearse in your head regularly, but still haven't actually had.

🐌 The way you squeeze "just one more thing" into an already full day, then arrive home with absolutely nothing left in the tank.

🐌 The team member you desperately want to take more responsibility, while still checking, correcting, or stepping back in every time they do.

🐌 The fact that every time a little bit of space appears in your diary, you fill it.

🐌 The person you're becoming increasingly resentful towards, who may have absolutely no idea you're expecting something different from them.

🐌 The way everybody else's needs somehow keep making it further up your priority list than your own.

None of these things are attacking you today. There's no emergency, nobody is forcing you to deal with them, and so they're incredibly easy to leave until tomorrow.

But they're still chasing you.

The reason my answer is always lion rather than snail isn't because I particularly enjoy being blindsided by enormous problems (although, like many of you, I'm actually pretty bloody good in a crisis). It's because of the HUMONGOUS energy drain of the snail chase.

Every time your brain remembers that thing still isn't dealt with, there's another little withdrawal from you - your attention, your energy, your emotional bandwidth, and maybe even your sleep. 

The snail doesn't need to catch you for it to have an impact.

I think one of the traps we can fall into as leaders is measuring the seriousness of a problem by its urgency, but not all serious problems are urgent. Something can be completely non-urgent today and profoundly costly if ignored for another six months.

So...

What's your snail? 🐌 

What is slowly following you around that isn't painful enough to force you to deal with it, but takes energy from you every single day? 

Some snails are problems you need to deal with. But (warning - hard truth incoming...)... some snails are patterns you're creating yourself. 

Heck, sometimes you're even feeding the snail yourself 🥬