Item #47: Upping-My-Game

I have been lucky enough to meet a few new and incredible people over the last few weeks. An amazing writer and art director team who truly get the new world of communications, an engagement planning guru and another new media strategist who is on-the-pulse and sees beyond the horizon.

It’s been an eye-opening few weeks, confusing and stressful at times. But in this short period of exposure, I realized something. They were upping-my-game. Big time.

And isn’t that a great thing? To have to up-your-game? It is, and I’m excited about it. But I’m also self-aware enough to recognize the other side of the challenge to ‘up-your-game’.

See… when you meet people who challenge you, people who are doing things differently, and differently in a way that you aspire to, well, you can either get energized and rise to the challenge, or it can bring up a bunch of ‘other’ ‘self’ stuff. Truth is, seems like both happen – you are energized and still ‘other’ ‘self’ stuff comes up.

‘The Stuff’:

For me at least, the stuff is all around questioning ‘what was’. I mean if you are suddenly exposed to people who are upping-your-game, then how can you not look back at what you have been doing, up until that very moment, and not feel like it was insufficient, not good enough. This is the ‘other’ ‘stuff’ side of people who inspire you to up-your-game.

‘The Flipside’:

Here’s the flipside, the accurate side. Maybe the side most of you are already all over. First of all, kudos has to go to people who are open to ‘upping-their-game’. Someone smart once said that the smartest people realize how little they know. So, it’s pretty damn smart and confident in my books to embrace continuous growth and development – continuous upping-of-the-game.

And here’s the very likely reality. Upping-the-game is likely not about going from bad to good. It’s probably more like going from good to great, or even, from great to awesome.

So if you are on an awesome-ness quest, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you are one who recognizes and embraces upping-your-game.

Bring it on. Up-your-game.