Do you add energy or take it away from situations?

Tied off

When you enter a discussion do you do so with awareness and add energy with bright eyes and encouraging statements? Nothing annoys me more than people entering a discussion, finding reasons why a concept won’t work and then they turn the discussion around to something they would rather talk about, all the while the energy and creativity has left. This normally happens when questions drill down into the detail of concepts (“the devil is in the detail”), you can always find reasons not to do things if you look hard enough. I find energy and enthusiasm such an attractive trait as it isn’t that common, people that will explore ways that things can be done, instead of why not to do it. My network is full of people that have these traits and to balance that off I always have no trouble finding people who will tell me what is wrong with the concept. It is important to have balance, the concepts wouldn’t get legs if not for the energy and enthusiasm provided first up. Last week I gave about 2 ½ days of my time to help a couple of farmers near Freeling (SA) re-fence their paddocks after a really nasty fire went through there at the end of November (Pinery). Now there is no way we would get all of their fencing done in that time so the idea was to kick start it. The 2 neighbours were pretty well organised to start and I had no idea how much we would get up so hard to know how much to organise. We just started on Monday morning with big smiles and lots of energy, well over the course of the time it was amazing how many other volunteers joined and how much fencing we put up. We finished the 1st paddock and the other neighbour had to quickly find us another stretch to put in. Again the enthusiastic network came into play, this wouldn’t have happened without a good mate who organised it and another who travelled from near Keith to give me a hand. When we left on Wednesday we had put up about 2.4km of fencing and the people we were helping were really full of energy to complete the mammoth task ahead. If you work on the motto that “a job started is a job half done” then I would like to think we gave those people a start and left some of our energy and enthusiasm behind that they can spread. Do you leave energy, enthusiasm and goodwill in your wake?