Can't See the Trees For the Forest

By : Suzi Elton



Most people know the meaning of "you can't see the forest for the trees". It means that you get bogged down in the minutia of daily life and miss the big picture or the purpose of the activities of your life.

It is also possible to miss the trees for the forest. What this means is that you get so involved in your goals and the things you want to accomplish that you aren't living and enjoying your life every day. You aren't connecting with people. You aren't noticing the beauty about you. You get into a habit of rigidity about taking action to advance your goals. It's easy to seem rather a tornado of activity blithely running over anyone or anything in your way. If you recognize your current behavior here, here are some ideas for you to consider.

1.) Immediately decide to become present in your day to day life - with yourself and with the people around you. Open your eyes to the beauty. Deliberately slow down. Allow more time for everything. Cut out activities that make you frantic. Take a look at your schedule and start to eliminate activities. Most of us do a lot of "have to's", and engage in activities because, "I'm doing this to please others" or, "I've been doing this - so I will keep doing it.". Release as much of this as you can.

2.) Take a fresh look at the timeline you have set for your goals. There's a good chance that a lot of your issues comes from setting a needlessly aggressive timeline. Some of us humans have a tendency to keep our lives unnecessarily "amped up". There may even be a tendency to be an "adrenaline junkie". Give this up.

Even if it gets you to your goal sooner - you missed the ride there. If you had "croaked" (i.e., died) on the way to your goal - you would have missed your life. (Note: If you're a procrastinator - this article is not for you. Don't use it as an excuse not to achieve your goals.)

3.) Look at your goals again and take the time to put them in order of priority. Often people will function as if every goal has the same priority. It's much better to choose to focus on your top 3 goals, with special concentration on your #1 goal. The most common self sabotage that clients indulge in is pretending that all their goals have #1 priority. As a result, they either feel overwhelmed and do nothing, or else, they take sporadic and half hearted efforts and they never make any meaningful progress on their multiple goals.

4.) One of the clearest signs that you don't see the trees for the forest is when you cut off suggestions from others without listening. This is usually caused by a self created "timeline intensity" mentality. Use this as a guideline to signal yourself that you are missing the trees in your life - and choose to take different action.

5.) This "missing the trees" style sets you up to be insensitive to the needs of others. It creates a tendency to be totally unaware of discomfort, hurt feelings, and frustrations others experience in dealing with your steam roller behavior. It doesn't mean you are being bad, just clueless. Failing to pay attention to the signals of others around you can cost you dearly in business, and it would likely be a failure which you would not even understand or have any appreciation about the causation.

It is easy to get wrapped up in our goals when we are very success oriented. It is common to lose sight of the trees when we have our focus on the forest of our goals. This can be changed - and the changes are likely to bring you greater success and certainly greater happiness. Experiment with it and see what you think.