Are you raising mountains?

I am at war! No, not with another human being, but with moles and voles. My yard must be the Mecca of mole/vole activity. These moles and voles have taken their toll and I am sick of them. The weapons of my warfare have been environmentally friendly from castor oil to tone emitters that supposedly moles and voles don’t like. But, leave it to my moles and voles to act as though they enjoy the castor oil for easier tunnel movement, and began using the emitting tones as mating calls. Needless to say, they have been winning the battle, This may be a yearlong endeavor, but I will not throw in the towel, not me, not yet. While they may be winning battles, the war is not over!!

While dealing with this conflict, I learned many lessons, and discovered one that truly astonished me from a leadership perspective. This discovery occurred during one of my more frustrating moments while I was smashing molehills—toe to heel, heel to toe—that looked like a circulatory system of varicose veins in my yard. My anger caused my tension to heighten, building up inside me like molten lava awaiting eruption, when I found myself saying to myself, “Why do you always have to make mountains out of molehills?” 

After breaking my own tension with a little personal laughter, there it was, a transforming leadership lesson, right in front of me, and it came in the form of a question, “Do you realize how really low you have to go to create a mountain out of a molehill? I tried it. I actually laid my left ear on the ground beside the molehill and closed my right eye looking now through my left eye up at the peaks of molehill mountain, elevation 2.5 inches. Nothing I could do to make it bigger, except sink lower.

Most people think making mountains out of molehills is blowing things way out of proportion, or making little things bigger than they are in reality, and while these thoughts are true they are more symptomatic in nature, rather than causative. Truth is, one has to sink really low themselves in order to make a molehill appear as a mountain. Some sink in fear, some sink in doubt, some sink in anxiety, some sink in anger, some sink in lack of self confidence, or self control, or sink in the vast depths of self pride, or self-pity. There are a myriad of things that can cause one to sink. 

The only way to combat the sinking process is to take a hard look inside and determine what, as a leader, causes you to sink enough to make a molehill look like a mountain. Once determined, then build a platform of support that will keep you from sinking any further. I call it a, “bridging the quicksand.” This is how an authentic leader truly wins any war, personally and professionally.