Find Some Shrimp for Your Rice

Recently, I was at a Training and Leadership Instituted (TLI) for my Toastmasters Club.  For those not familiar, Toastmasters is an organization that promotes development of speaking, communication and leadership skills. 

During the TLI, I met a variety of people from other clubs.  One gal, S., who struck up a conversation with me during the break, told me how her club was struggling to maintain members.  S. said they would likely need to close their doors before summer. She was desperate to turn things around but didn't know how.

“Your club is thriving.” S. said. “Do you have any advice for a club that is sinking?”

I thought for a minute and said “It sounds like you need to find some shrimp for your rice.”

S. raised her eyebrows.  I could tell this was the last thing she expected me to say. But, as S. would discover, I had a very logical explanation for suddenly turning the topic of conversation to lunch.

I like to read.  Since I have three kids, you’ll most often find me reading Harry Potter, The Magic Tree House or Knuffle Bunny.  But on the advice of a colleague, I had recently read a book called Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath.

In Switch, the authors tell a story about an Activist who visited a village of rice farmers suffering from malnutrition. The Activist had six months to figure out why the villagers were starving and to fix the problem.  Instead of spending weeks cataloguing everything that was wrong – lack of proper education, poor sources of daily vitamins, etc. – the Activist looked around for the healthiest families. He called them the “bright spots.” 

On most levels, the bright spot families lead their lives exactly like every other villager. They awoke at the same time each day.  They worked in the same fields.  They went to sleep at the same time each night.  And they ate rice every day for every meal.

The only difference was that the mothers of the bright spot families fed their children four small meals a day instead of two larger ones; and they mixed sweet potato greens and brine shrimp into their rice.  It turns out that the additional vitamins and proteins from the sweet potatoes and shrimp, plus the spacing of smaller meals, was enough to make a difference between healthy and unhealthy. 

After finding these bright spots, the Activist set to work encouraging the other families to make the same change.  Six months later, 65% of the children were better nourished.

Bright spot thinking is a great way to approach any problem.  Whether its how to keep your house cleaner or how to improve the way you do your job, a little bright spot thinking can go a long way.  Using bright spot thinking means that instead of focusing on all the problems, all the things that are going wrong, you step back and look for the bright spots, the things that are going right. 

Lucky for us, the bright spots are easy to find.  They are the shining stars.  They are the highlights.  They are hard to miss. 

Once you find the bright spots, you watch.  You observe.  You see what the bright spots are doing that is so right.  You ask, what makes them bright? Then you do that too. 

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

I like to use bright spot thinking when I exercise.  When I work out, there are some exercises that I can do well and that I like.  And there are some that I can’t do well and that I hate.  So I try to focus on the bright spots.  I make it a point to work twice as hard on the exercises I can do.  For exercises that I can’t do or that I don’t like, I try to find someone who does them well.  I watch them.  Then I try to copy their moves.

My conversation with S. only lasted a few minutes.  After that, we parted ways.  And though I may never know for sure, I sometimes wonder whether she ever found some shrimp for her rice.

P.S.  How do the photos fit this story?  Just showing off a couple of bright spots. :-)