One of my mum’s favourite sayings when I was growing up was:
**“You have to pick your battles.” **
It made me so mad.
Until, about ten years later, I had to admit how right she was.
Let’s go way back in time to 15-year-old Shanti: full of rage, full of opinions I was very attached to, and absolutely certain I was right about all of them.
I remember watching my mum have yet another conversation where, in my opinion, she didn’t stand up for herself. She was correct. The other person was wrong. My mum was the smartest person I knew! Obviously she was right! But she would let the louder, more emotional person talk as though they were correct, then get herself out of the conversation and move on with her life.
This was completely unacceptable to 15-year-old me. I would go up to her in all my teenage bluster:
“Why didn’t you stand up for yourself?! Why are you being a doormat?! You’re right! They’re wrong! You have to fight for yourself!”
(Before you think it: I know. If I were my mum, I would have wanted to slap me too.)
She would take a breath and calmly say:
**“You have to pick your battles.” **
At this point you can picture 15-year-old me with steam coming out of my ears. And we’d usually have a couple more rounds of me arguing and Mum repeating the same sentence.
At the time, I didn’t understand what she was really trying to teach me:
**Your time and energy are finite resources. You have to use them wisely. **
The irony, completely lost on 15-year-old me, was that Mum was a financial management consultant. Managing finite resources was quite literally her day job.
When I was about 25, I remember going back to Mum, hat in hand, and telling her I was sorry. She was right. By then, I had learned that fighting every battle was expensive. Not just in my own time and energy, but in relationships.
Then, at around 35, I realised there was another layer to it:
Sometimes a battle still needs to be fought, **but I don’t necessarily *need *to be the person fighting it. **Sometimes my job is to establish the facts, gather the evidence, and give the person upstream of me what they need to put the case forward.
That’s something project management has taught me particularly well.
Knowing where a decision sits matters. So does knowing the extent of your own authority. Good escalation isn’t throwing every difficult problem up the chain and asking someone else to deal with it.
It’s handling what sits within your responsibility, and when something genuinely requires authority you don’t have, giving the right person enough information to make the next decision.
You don’t need to fight a battle that isn’t yours to fight.
The cruel irony of all this external growth is that I still have the big internal reaction.
That’s wrong.
That’s unfair.
That doesn’t make sense.
Someone should do something about that.
THIS ISN’T RIGHT!
Apparently 15-year-old Shanti is alive and well. I’ve just learned to create some space between the internal reaction and the external response.
Because no matter the internal reaction, sometimes the appropriate response is:
To wait,
To gather further information,
To calmly put forward an alternative solution,
To reframe the problem,
To escalate to the appropriate authority,
To do absolutely nothing,
And yes, sometimes I still need to fight.
I still get this wrong occasionally. I still overreact. But it’s rare now, and thankfully it doesn’t come with quite the same gusto as 15-year-old me.
The longer time goes on, the more I realise that most things aren’t worth fighting about. And when something is worth fighting about, there’s another question:
**Who is actually in the best position to get the outcome this project needs?
The older I get, the less attached I am to being seen to be right. I’d rather get the outcome that works for the mission. I’d rather be part of a team that gets quality things done.
And, like a lot of things I’m learning and relearning now, somehow I keep arriving back at the same conclusion:
Sorry, Mum. You were right.
Originally published on LinkedIn.