Lesson — notes

Sam McLaren
Digital Dorset
Published in
4 min readAug 6, 2021

As part of my #weeknotechallenge I have decided to challenge myself to doing a different style of weeknotes every week.

We are now on weeknote #28, time just keeps on flying

The other weeknotes in the challenge are linked below:

‘Traditional’ Weeknotes , Gif-Notes , Sketch-Notes, Shanty-Notes, Week-quotes, Animal Crossing — Notes , Poster — Notes, Haiku — notes, Achievement — notes, Hanami — notes, Meme — notes, Retro — notes, Comic — notes, Story — notes, Slang — notes, Tweet — notes, Blog — notes, Hansai — notes,Show & Tell — notes, Taskmaster — notes, Lyrical — notes, Rap — notes, Wellbeing — notes,Football — notes, Superhero — notes,Hot or Not — notes, Olympic — notes

This week i am not doing one of the ideas on my list, this is something that has come up during the week!

Instead of reflecting on specifics of what happened this week i am going to be talking about some of the lessons learnt. Everyone’s always learning lessons and they never stop; they form people into who they are.

So here are some from this week:

Its nothing personal kid

This is something that can be hard to get your head around and i struggle with this. This week i had a scenario where i initially took something personally.

What works for me to combat this is i try to rephrase the issue so instead of ‘they are changing something i did’ it’s more like ‘they are just trying to make it better’ it has nothing to do with me its for the benefit of the event. It also helps to not be reactive to things like this and sleep on it. Almost all of the time you will have a better perspective on it the next day (this applies to lots of other stuff as well).

There is a TED talk on this exact subject i really like. There isn’t anyone better than a football ref to talk about not taking things personally.Instead of thinking they hate him, they just passionately want their team to win.

Picking your battles

Picking your battles is interesting because i feel that often the people who say this a lot never actually pick a battle they want to fight.

I agree that picking your battles is important but i also feel that your already off to the wrong start by calling it a battle.

This isn’t how your conversations should look. It should be about finding common ground and trying to find something that works. The reason a lot of these ‘battles’ happen is because that what both sides see them as. They want to win.

There was an example of that this week. Instead of trying to ‘win’ I’m going to try and understand the side they have taken and then try to find some commonality. We both want what’s best for the service so why should we be at odds?

Moving forward

Moving forward is something that is easier said than done. There was an example of that this week where a conversation and arrangement didn’t go as it was initially planned to and things changed.

It can be beneficial to reflect on the past (look what i am doing now) but i also think that with some things its best to focus on what you can do moving forward instead of what happened.

I focused on what i could do to make sure that we can prevent this from happening in future being more open and understanding different points of view.

“We must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

Confidence is key

One thing that has struck me the past week is a lesson that is obvious to lots. Confidence. You could have been doing something for years and don’t come across as confident in it.As a secret introvert somethings you just have to fake it to make it.It helps build trust, understanding, and opens up for more collaboration when you are being actively listened to.

Projecting confidence can give people the confidence that you know what you are doing but what really is a great feeling is someone being confident in you.

There is a thin line between confidence and cockiness though!

Speak next week.

Sam out!

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Sam McLaren
Digital Dorset

Working to promote Dorset as a place to live, work, and visit. DL100 member. Inspiringthefuture volunteer. TED Speaker #SamsBrightIdeas