Do you notice when someone holds a door for you? Do you notice when the elderly couple is having difficulty with their luggage. Do you notice the pregnant mom standing on the train from your seat? Do you notice when you’ve accidentally cut someone off? Do you notice when someone is having difficulty merging into traffic? Do you notice when you are blocking an aisle or sidewalk? Do you notice when your employees are overwhelmed? Do you notice the little things that don’t affect you but you can affect?

Making an impact requires that you keep your head up. It’s all to easy to go about our day with our head down, not noticing the things going on around us. Keep your head down and miss opportunity. Keep your head down and miss your competition take your flank. Keep your head down and miss a subtle opportunity to help your customer out of a jam. Keep your head down and accidentally cause an outage in your biggest account. Keep your head down and miss an opportunity to make a difference. Keep your head down long enough and when you finally pick it up things won’t look familiar.

Most of us are self-centric. We’re too busy to worry about others. We are too busy to make other peoples problems our problems. What we forget, is other peoples problems can become our problems. We forget, other people’s problems are opportunities for us to grow. Other peoples problems create an opportunity for us to make a difference. Other peoples problems can make us innovators and leaders. But to do that we have to pick up our head.

Pick up your head . . . you’ll be amazed at what you see.