As the proud owner of two kittens (as well as a cat and a mad dog), I am already well used to herding cats…
This month, though, I have had my own beliefs challenged as I have attempted to herd cats of a different kind.
At the beginning of the month, I naively and boldly took a leap of faith (notice the repeating pattern here) and sent out a request to 400 people, asking them to move from one payment system to another.
I say naive because I honestly believed they would follow the request…simples…just as I had done when I was one of 16,000 Rock Choir members asked to do exactly the same thing last year. What could possibly go wrong?
Perhaps I should never have tempted fate by asking that question, for starters!
Suffice it to say, it has not gone according to plan! I genuinely never expected 80% of people to ignore the request; I never expected so many people to challenge the request…and even refuse!
I could find myself doing what I often do and taking ‘over-responsibility’ for the lack of action…after all, ‘the meaning of the communication is the response you get’ so I must have mis-communicated the request in some way…and it probably didn’t help that I sent out the request when mercury was retrograde, for goodness sake!
Of course, the consequence is I’m now having to manage the situation so closely it has become incredibly time consuming and quite stressful…and I feel like I am nagging now, because I am having to find so many different ways of saying the same thing.
Instead, for now, I will redress the balance slightly by reminding myself what I used to say to my children when they accused me of nagging:
“If you could do what I asked you to do the first, or maybe even the second time I asked, then I wouldn’t have to nag!”