your own Drake's Passage
The only way to get to Antarctica from the southernmost tip of South America at Cape Horn is to cross Drake’s Passage. Although it is the shortest crossing from the rest of the world to Antarctica, it took us forty-five hours when I made the excursion a few years ago. Drake’s Passage is notorious for rough seas and unpredictable weather because it is a confluence of three big oceans, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Antarctic. Seas can surprise you with their calm, but this passage is famous for flinging ships and passengers around capriciously and violently. For those of you who get sea-sick, I imagine that renders you immediately sympathetic!
Even for those of us who stay land-bound, that wild and chaotic confluence is not so unfamiliar if you think metaphorically. A few years ago I worked with a client who managed several million square feet of commercial/retail real estate. His Drake's Passage was expressed as the pressure he felt to keep “all the audiences” happy. The owners wanted to keep costs down, the tenants wanted A+ (and expensive) services, and the contractors often had to be persuaded just to get the job done on time. Similarly, academic development officers straddle the needs of students, faculty and alumni fundraising pressures. What’re your competing commitments? Sometimes the specific push of pressures doesn't seem obvious on the surface, but we all have them. Even the now-famous “work-life balance” conversation is all about these kinds of competing commitments. “How do I make it to my daughter’s soccer game and still meet the deadline my boss just handed me?” Try mixing in that yoga class you’ve been wanting to take. Or finding time to read the best-selling novel everyone is talking about. Hanging out with your friends to watch the game? Some of the people I work with say they just want to get a good night’s sleep!
The first step to navigating your own Drake's Passage is to fully see and understand the competing pressures. Draw a circle on a page with you at the center and surround "you" with other little circles to represent all the the other needs you want/need to meet. The more important they are to you, the closer you move their little circle. Very often we put someone else in the middle and take only their point of view; it’s too easy to lose track of your own. It's not hard to spot your own Drake’s Passage where the confluence of big competing oceans of pressures converge on little ol’ you in the middle of it all. Don’t capsize! Just naming and acknowledging the presence of the big oceanic pressures can help you stay the course, even if progress is slow, turbulent, and sometimes sideways.
