Noticing the Uniqueness of Others

Coinciding with the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, I set-up an office Olympics where I work.  We had three teams: Fiji, Jamaica, and Barbados.  I chose tropical locales because, frankly, it has been a long cold winter here and we all needed a hint of the islands.  Over the course of three weeks we had a variety of different events such as Recycling Basketball, Paper Airplane Javelin, Lemon Fencing, Synchronized Office Chair Swivel, Finger Skating, and Rubber Band Archery.  Each activity only took about 15 minutes out of our day and it was well worth it.  The resulting laughter and just the simple act of getting out of our individual offices and workstations and coming together for a few minutes every day around something other than work was refreshing.  The closing ceremonies were this past Friday and included a photo slide show (set to the Olympic theme song, naturally) of the participants and spectators at each of the events. 

What I found to be the most rewarding part of the whole experience was seeing how everyone in the office rallied around one of our co-workers in particular.  She is a quiet lady who works hard and keeps busy.  She hails from outside the United States, and has a lovely accent and a gentle spirit.  During the office Olympics, her team needed someone to sign-up to compete in Rubber Band Archery and she agreed even though she admitted that she didn't know how to shoot a rubber band.  She approached me in the hallway one day and I thanked her for volunteering and she said, she was nervous about it because she didn't know what rubber band archery was.  I told her that it isn't a thing... that I just made it up as a fun activity...that nobody knows what it is.  She was so relieved to hear that!  Have you ever been sure that everyone else knows about something and you are the odd, clueless man out?  I explained that I would be setting up some targets and that rubber bands would be given out and that the object was to shoot the rubber band with your fingers at the targets and try to hit them.  Nothing to worry about!

The day of the event arrived and I set up a bunch of paper and plastic cups on the ledge of an empty cubicle and let the competitors from teams Jamaica, Fiji and Barbados have a few minutes to practice.  She stepped up to the line and acted like she had been shooting rubber bands her whole life.  It was like the heavens opened and shined down on her and her alone for those few moments.  She knocked those cups off the ledge one right after the other like a sharp shooter, stretching each rubber band back nearly to its breaking point before letting them fly.  The staff who were gathered around cheered and watched in awe, even those who weren't on her team.  Turns out that someone on her team had sent her a link to a YouTube video of how to shoot rubber bands (Is there nothing you can't find on the internet these days?) and she had been practicing at home since she had signed-up!  She ended up winning the gold medal without breaking a sweat and a conversation broke out around the office at how her approach to rubber band archery closely resembled her approach to everything that she does.  Her colleagues raved about how if there was skill she didn't have or a program she didn't know how to use, she would pay close attention as it was taught and she would work at it diligently until she became as good or better at it than the person who taught her.  Everyone in the office started seeing this quiet, sweet lady in a different light and by the time the closing ceremonies came around last week, when a photo of the rubber band archery champ came up on the screen, the whole office clapped and cheered.

It took stepping outside of the normal routine to be able to see her uniqueness for what it was.  Now when we step back into the norm, we will have a new found respect and a clearer picture of who she is and what she is capable of.

How can you create opportunities in your family, your job, your church, your group of friends to shake off the old routine enough to give people a chance to let their uniqueness show and give yourself a chance to notice it?  Give it a try!  You'll be glad you did.  

---