#3: See and appreciate the people around you
Glacier National Park
Utmost beauty, amazing views and a very, very busy park. To get a parking spot near the trailhead, you have to get there before sunrise, which meant a 4 am wake up for me (which was 3 am my time), after arriving at 11 pm the night before. I definitely laid down and rested my eyes on a couple trails, but I digress.
After deciding and planning for a 14 miler, I realized that some other hikes I had been planning on doing whist I was there were actually offshoots of the main trail!
Amazing, amazing I thought. What’s another few miles to get to do all these hikes in one day?
Well after adding a little under 10 miles and over 3,000 ft of elevation gain, let me tell you… not amazing.
I ran out of water, couldn’t eat food and got heat exhaustion… lovely.
But guess what I remember the most about that hike? All the amazingly incredible people that I met along the way.
- The incredible guy who gave me some of his precious water after I ran out.
- An angel of a woman that ended up carrying my pack for me the last 10 minutes because my body failed me.
- All the wonderful people mutually cheering each other on to keep going and get to the end.
I have such fond memories of that hike and the whole day because I got to take pictures for people, fill up their water bottles with filtered water, cheer them on while they cheered me on and the people that saved me. I would have missed all of this if I had completely ignored them all and wallowed in my misery, but instead - I got to see and therefore appreciate all the absolutely amazing people I met that day!
Now think about work: It can be easy to walk around with our minds focused on just ourselves and not on others.
Do this project.
Get this work done.
Task, task task and no people.
Yet when we relinquish selfishness and start to look around and actually see others - we get to grow and deepen our relationships with others. We get to learn from their perspective and ideas. And we get to accomplish more because people want to do more for you if you care about them.