No one exercises until they have a heart attack

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

by St John Craner 

Denial is a coping mechanism: “If I ignore it, it might go away.”

The signs are there to tell you something.

Yet most people never take action until they are forced to take action.

Newton’s law of motion explains this human behaviour perfectly:

If it’s not health, it might be a loss of a different kind like divorce or death.

Only when they are faced with an undeniable reality are they forced to take notice and face what Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) calls “brutal realities”.

Worse with heart attack victims is the fact that 42 percent of patients post-surgery never commit to a healthier lifestyle.

It reminds me of that quote:

“If you don’t make time for health, you’ll have to make time for illness.”

Only when they are told they won’t see their grandkids do they actually do something about it. A suggestion like that only works because it taps deeper into their true motivation.

Only when it matters and becomes more meaningful do they take action like taking time out and off farm, drinking less, making sleep a priority or changing diet.

When it comes to your farming business, the same warning signals might be there but you may be choosing to ignore them right now because you don’t like what you see.

No burning platforms but a slow demise or downward spiral that doesn’t alert the senses in the same way.

Maybe you’ve just lost one of your best farm managers or milkers.

Maybe your animals are not producing at the rates they used to.

Maybe your cropping isn’t giving you the yields you’d usually expect.

When something feels off, it usually means it’s off.

Take the time to stop and reflect on things by asking yourself:

■  What can you learn from this?

■  What actions can you take to avoid the same situation happening again?

■  Have I committed to the discipline of pre-briefing and de-briefing with my farming team?

■ What do I need to stop/start/continue?

■ What’s my ‘stop doing’ list? (not my ‘to do’ list)

■ What’s vital and necessary and what’s “nice to have” and discretionary?

We learn more from our losses than our wins because they have always said “success is a lousy teacher”.

Losing teaches us so much more if we’re willing to be brave and look deep inside.

We can learn a lot from life.

We have to be gracious and be thankful for the learning, even if we don’t feel it at the time because we might be hurting.

That reflection in the mirror can be very hard.

I can tell you this has taken me years to work out for myself both personally and professionally — what truly drives me, who and what matters to me most, and what I need to be for my family and the clients and communities I serve.

Feedback is a gift we can choose to take or not. When we do take it on board it usually makes us better people and better businesses.

So what signals are you seeing?

■ Are you or your farming team low on energy or burnt out?

■ Are you experiencing increased or continual turnover in your team?

■ Are you seeing or experiencing more sickness and absenteeism?

■ Are you sensing a growing reluctance and resistance in yourself or your team? If you are, you need to work out what the drivers of disengagement are so they and you can be at their best. Clear the debris in their path first.

■ Maybe you need to spend more time with them working out what their real motivations are and where they want to be as individuals? (solve the root cause, not surface level symptoms).

■ Maybe you need to make yourself more available to mentor and coach your team as it can be super tough on-farm in all weathers (all important truck time and never-to-be-missed 1:1 performance appraisals).

■ Maybe their confidence is low because their competencies are low? (did you on-board them properly? Are you training them on specific skills based on their experience or tenure?

Work out why.

What are the root causes?

Taking action on such signs sooner rather than later means mild effects versus myocardial infarction (the medical term for heart attack).

Like weeds in a garden you need to keep on top of them.

See the signs for what they really are before they take over.

Don’t ignore them. Do something about them.

Doing nothing will mean nothing changes.

St John Craner is the owner and founder of agrarian.co.nz a rural sales and marketing company that serves the NZ agricultural sector.