Byron's Babbles

Cam

For those that are regular readers of my blog, you know that I love cats. To be clear, however, we have no cats in the house and none that curl up in my lap to watch TV. Ours are farm/barn cats that play an important role in rodent control and are free to roam the entire farm. Nonetheless, I love them and they are very well taken care of. Ours are not typical barn cats in that these are all pets and are always sitting on bales of hay or up on posts waiting to be petted. And…always lined up ready for me to feed them morning and evening. For me, they are just fun to watch.

This morning it was raining and as I walked through the barn to start the morning feeding I looked down and saw the wet paw 🐾 prints, pictured here in this post, on the barn floor and I knew exactly which cat they were from – Cam. Cam is always the first cat to stir and I knew he would be up on his tower waiting for me to acknowledge him and pet him. Sure enough, there he was. This got me to thinking about what footprints we are leaving behind and what our predictability/dependability is.

As a fan of Winston Churchill, I am reminded of his saying, ‘We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” So what are our footprints doing to make a life? We could even divide this into some of the different roles we play in life.

Think about our role as a parent. Most children imitate their parents, copying mannerisms and ways of responding to situations.  As parents, we walk through life leaving footprints that express the qualities we value for our children to follow. We need to make sure we leave lasting imprints and not ones that quickly dry up and disappear like the wet cat paw 🐾 prints that inspired this post.

We all have mentors/coaches in our professional and personal lives. We need to make sure we are leaving lasting and life-giving footprints for our mentees. Also, we need to make sure to honor and follow in the footprints of our mentors/coaches. By doing so, we honor the people who invested their lives into us and our organizations. By following their footprints, we recognize that we have been given a “step up” by standing on what they have already accomplished.

Footprints clearly leave an impression. The way we lead, transact our personal business, and interact with others should leave an impression, too. We need to make sure the impression we leave has a lasting impression.

Our footprints show where we have been, what we have done, what direction we are headed, and what course corrections we have made along the way. Our footprints are the diary of what we have done. The pattern of your footprints is a testimony to the kind of person and leader we are.

Take a look over your shoulder at your footprints. Do they express the values and actions that you want others to associate with you? Have your footprints made a clear impression? Finally, are your footprints making a lasting impression?