The leaf, leap and the results

Your idea on what to focus on when writing your thesis has travelled around the university long before I got a chance to talk to you. The professor looked at me. I felt slightly embarrassed and nervous. Part of me feared that he would laugh at me and say that it was a crazy idea and what have you, but he was kind, understanding and went a long with my idea (at least to begin with 🙂 ). He challenged me to set it up, how, what, where, when until I finally realised myself that it could never work in real life.

Tuesday last week I wrote a blog post about The Law of Attraction. I set up an experiment and by that I took on the challenge if I could focus and manifest my way to having more followers on this blog (partly because I was curious if I could get it to work and partly because I was (slightly) feed up reading stories about people that claimed to have been manifesting this and that AFTER it had happened). So yes, I was provoked and wanted to do something differently (again you might add). Like the way my thesis at university started out.

A lot of people wanted to write about leadership. What does it take to be a good leader? Is it something you can learn or is it a capability, that you’re born with? And so on. And what did I decide? Well it was certainly something completely different to make the rumor go around the university like it did. I decided to write about BAD leadership.

I wanted to know how it affected the employees and the company/organisation as a whole. But how do you really figure that out? I needed a company as a case for my thesis, but of course there was no way I could say, you know what? I’m curious about bad leadership – would you like to be part of my thesis?

I was 100% dependent on that someone would allow me to spend hours observing and talking to the leaders and their employees. So things to a different turn – a different view on leadership. There was no way I could have predicted the results I came out with in the end, but it was not only a very good learning experience, but it was truly a life changing one for me.

I discovered how much I love interviewing people for research purposes. I could prepare my questions and then when they started talking, things often took a different turn. It was both nerve wrecking and inspirational. Nerve wrecking because they would answer something I hadn’t seen coming and how was I suppose to fit their answers around all the theories I was studying? Inspirational because, well do I need to say? Obviously because the real life and real people always made it so much more fun and interesting and in a way more life-affirming than some random theory from a book.

So the results from my experiment wanting to go from 46 to 111 followers in 8 days?

Well as you may have figured out by now, I didn’t make it. I made it to 49. So does that mean I have failed and made a fool of myself? I will let you decide that (please be kind 🙂 ). Could I have predicted that I wouldn’t make it? Well if I had used theories on probabilities and how many followers I on average attract per week, then yes I could have predicted that there was no way I was ever going to reach a total of 111 in 8 days. After all that would mean that I would have the impact on a total of 65 random people to hit the FOLLOW button.

Is it a case of the theory not working? Or is it me that cannot make it work? Because I don’t understand it? Because I wasn’t good enough at staying positive the whole time? Because the universe wanted to teach me a different lesson and give me a completely different result, of which I could never have predicted?

Maybe I overstepped a special code that I was unaware of or maybe it’s because I was unaware that I had somehow unconsciously focused on the wrong media? Because I can tell you this much: On instagram I got 210 likes on this picture 🙂 (and I normally get about 3-6 likes per picture I post).

I could view this leap of faith as a failure and sit down and be sad about it all. Or I can choose to see it as another learning experience where the end results were something I couldn’t predict and in the process choose to smile like the leaf I found in the forrest last week.

And you know what? I am going to continue to do things in a different way – That’s just me.