You’ve heard the old adage, “Keep fighting the good fight,” right? This struck me the other day as kind of a funny piece of encouragement to give. What makes a good fight different from a bad fight? How do you know the difference? When you DO understand what the good fight is, how do you keep from giving up even when you are ready to be done with it?
In the context of business, I’ll define the good fight as any time you’re pushing for change that will benefit the business operationally, culturally, or financially. Perhaps this is revolutionizing a process or the way things are done. Perhaps it’s pushing your team to think differently about their work and how they impact other departments. Perhaps it’s asking management to reconsider how it approaches managing. These are all things that will positively impact the business in the long run.
In the context of your individual experience, the good fight is anything that is going to help you grow. You know what I’m talking about. This could be as simple as getting in shape or eating better. It could be a longterm initiative like paying attention to how you talk to your spouse because you want to change how you deal with stress in your life. Again, these are all things that are going to further your health in the long run.
To that end, what they never tell you is that the good fight is rarely, if ever, an easy fight. Today we find ourselves in an unprecedented “black swan” event that is forcing every person to consider what the good fight is for them, and whether they choose to keep going. If you are now staying at home and educating your children as you try to also get your work done, the good fight might be not losing your cool in the next five minutes. If you are a small business owner who has lost three clients in the last week, it might be giving yourself a minute before circling the wagons to figure out what’s next. This is not an easy time, but it is a time rife with opportunity – albeit perhaps not the type of opportunity we thought we’d be seeing towards the end of Q3 in 2020.
Whether you are working from home, holding down a workplace with a skeleton crew, trying to figure out how to pivot in this mess – keep it up. Fight the good fight. Remind yourself that the good fight is not easy, but you are growing and learning things today that you will need in two weeks, six months, five years. These things build on each other, and you have an opportunity even right now to create a culture of encouragement, innovation, and ingenuity today.
Epic movies – Lord of the Rings, Braveheart, Last of the Mohicans – always give us a really great emotional connection to what it means to fight the good fight. It’s easy to think that maybe the good fight only presents itself when there is life and death circumstances, a great evil – but I believe we all have opportunities to embrace the good fight, albeit in perhaps more subtle ways. Disclaimer: the good fight might seem more valuable when accompanied by a sweeping score and dramatic scenery. I will point out to you that the characters in these films did us the favor of demonstrating what it is to not give up on what matters.
Activity: Take three minutes (yes, set the timer!) to describe the good fight you’re fighting. This can be a bulleted list, a paragraph, anything that comes to mind. Consider: if this fight were easy, would it still be valuable?