Recently my brother, our four sisters and I went on a team-building weekend. My brother had done this about a year before with his company and experienced some large shifts in his life as a result. We are an extremely close family and did not go on the weekend to repair relationships, but to make them deeper and stronger while exploring our own personal challenges. Forty feet in the air on high rope courses, attached to lobster claws and carabineers, belays and harnesses we encouraged, guided and protected each other. But most important, we learned both from each other and about each other.
In one of our challenges the scenario was: as a rescue team we needed to save two pilots who crashed their plane while transporting human organs to transplant recipients. We had two hours to complete a variety of challenges on high rope courses and ground courses to get to the accident site, make the rescue and get everyone and the organs back to safety. We quickly gathered the equipment waiting for us on the front porch of the house and set off to locate the accident site. Checking our own equipment we took everything set out for us but two harnesses.
We made our way through the challenges and reached the airplane, pulled the pilots out and put them on the boards we brought to use as stretchers. After determining a hierarchy of needs, we transferred the six organs we could fit into our small cooler from the larger one on the plane. Unfortunately, we had to leave two organs behind. We approached a large wall that we needed to get up and over and then ride a zip line down to the rescue team waiting to take the pilots to safety.The pilots, end in sight ― we did not start out on our challenge with the end in sight ― we left the extra harnesses behind on the porch because we had ours.
End in sight ― nevertheless, we made it, we got two members of our team over the wall and down the zip line and had them send their harnesses back to us for the pilots. We made it, but we wasted a lot of valuable time and we added frustration and stress and a few arguments to our challenge.
Whether it is the way we live our life or the smallest task we are working on, remembering this lesson keeps us on a more healthy, direct and successful path.End in sight ― it is a simple concept, but so easily disregarded and too often ignored.
