Lessons from inanimate objects

Recently, we had the pleasure of meeting Melman via Shirley - a compassionate, playful leader, and as you’ll soon discover… A brilliant storyteller!

We simply had to share Shirley’s story with you. Reminding us all that some of life’s best lessons come from simple moments (and inanimate objects):

You spoke about A (what you can control) + B (outside of your control) = C (result), and how your mindset affects A, and how framing your approach can have such an impact. You had concrete sporting examples – world class athletes and what they achieve, and how they approach events which hold massive pressure.

I’ve got an example which sits almost at the other end of the spectrum, something that happens almost daily, it’s so mundane, it’s so dull:

The daily drive to school and work.  

I bought a car in the early part of the year. It’s blue, my favourite colour, with a light interior. It has seat and steering wheel heating, important for winter, and very good air con, important for summer! It was clean when I bought it, although the kids changed that fairly quickly. It’s a great car, I love it.

Except… it has a very, very, very sensitive parking sensor. Which beeps. A lot.  

And it beeps at two different speeds and volume. One volume is loud so you can’t miss it. The second is faster and louder, so you really can’t miss it. And at various points, the computer console shows what the camera sees behind the car.

It would be really easy to get frustrated by all this. Which I used to do. A lot.

I used to get very frustrated. Driving into the underground car park at the supermarket, the car would beep. Pulling up to get a ticket anywhere, the car would beep. Parking in the snow, yep, the car would beep. Reversing out of the garage every day, the car would beep.  

Just sitting in traffic, the console would change. Driving in the car park, it would change again. Often, I’d shout and swear at the car, telling it to ‘Shut up!’ or ‘I can see out the window, I don’t need you to show me what I can see!?’

Driving to work one day in the snow, the car beeped because of the snow piled at the side of the road. And in that moment I thought of Melman from Madagascar.

The car is now called Melman, and this has changed the whole family’s approach. Because we [now] see Melman as a somewhat needy, neurotic, worrying car!

Gone are the days of exclaiming / shouting / cursing, “Shut up, it’s a bloody car park!” Instead, it’s a much more soothing, “It’s alright Melman, it’s just a car park. You can do it”.

When my Mum drove the car the other day in traffic, the car behind got too close, and the camera switched on. Mum asked one of the kids “Why’s it doing that?”

My 10-year-old shrugged, “It’s just Melman being Melman.”

Talking to friends the other evening, someone was saying how they’d lost it with their car as it was beeping at them. And I realized that it’d been months since I’d done the same.

But the only thing that had changed was my approach to the beeping.

In fact, the beeping now makes me smile. And often when I’m smiling about this and finding the enjoyment in the ridiculousness of having a needy, neurotic car, I think about you all.  

For me it’s that it’s a daily reminder that how we frame things can have such a massive, massive impact.

— Shirley 🚙