While I was living in a second floor apartment a most annoying mockingbird started a habit of singing in a tree outside my window late at night. It would wake me up, so I would open the window and yell at the bird. It would stop singing for a while, then start up again when I was back in bed. This went on many nights and was taking its toll on me. I bought a BB gun and tried to eliminate the bird, but I never spotted it.
I was getting desperate until I came up with an idea of fighting fire with water. I decided to make him unhappy with that tree. I took the screen off my window and threw a bucket of water into the tree before going to bed. I figured the bird was sleeping and I would give him a cold shower. He still sang that night, but I did the same thing the next night and never heard from the bird again. I assume he moved to a drier climate.
Several years later as a homeowner I was having trouble with barn swallows building mud nests under my front entryway. They were causing a big mess. I knocked the nests down, but they would rebuild them. I remembered my experience with the mockingbird and thought about what barn swallows wouldn’t like. I taped strings from the top of the entryway so they would hang down where the birds flew. If I were a bird I wouldn’t like flying through strings. Sure enough the birds moved off and never came back.
My inspiration for thinking like a bird came from Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. In it he quotes Henry Ford as saying, “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” I did my best to think about what the birds wanted, a dry tree in which to sleep and flying space with no obstructions. By eliminating those things the birds moved elsewhere to find them.
Henry Ford’s advice was the cornerstone of operating my insurance agency for over thirty one years. My overriding goal each day was to do my best to put myself in the shoes of the person with whom I was dealing. That included clients, employees and insurance company representatives. This helped me give them what they wanted. The rest of the business was just details. I guess you could say that looking at things from another’s perspective gave me a bird’s eye view.
May you have enough today, one moment at a time.
THIS HELPED ME 