What is your impact?  I saw a reel about a teacher who had a nonverbal student and in an effort to connect and encourage the student to speak, the teacher left the student a sticky note with a little cartoon on the student’s desk every day.  There didn’t seem to be much progress as the student remained nonverbal for the entire school year in spite of multiple interventions and different tools to assist the child.  Two years passed and the teacher received an envelope with a single sticky note in it that said, “I saved all of your sticky notes.  Thank you so much, you helped me more than you know.”  The teacher goes on to say that we never really know what our impact is but even the small things make a difference.  Story from Matt Eicheldinger.  We hear things like this all the time and we lose patience with ourselves when we don’t feel we are making an impact or if the impact we want isn’t visible, but it is sometimes a bit later when we see the results of our actions.

In a world that is constantly on, connected, and moving, it’s difficult to wait for anything.  It’s hard to believe that something is happening if we don’t see immediate results.  But our human nature is aligned with the nature of the universe and understands that sometimes (all the time) things operate in their own timing.  Most growth is unseen.  The vegetable growing under the Earth, the iceberg under the water, the treasures buried within.  So if all of those amazing things are unseen, why do we have the expectation that our greatness will always be on display?  Perhaps the question is why do we have the expectation that the greatness of our impact will be on display?  It isn’t—and it isn’t meant to be.  We are meant to do our part, play our role, and sometimes that is simply to be a catalyst.  Sometimes that’s to be the stone that initiates the ripple.  Other times we are meant to hold center stage.  And other times we are meant to pass the torch.

The point is we are meant to play our part and that is it.  It’s great to know what we’ve done has reached someone but no matter if we are afforded that opportunity, the truth is we need to simply operate in silence, do what we are doing, share our gifts.  The laws of energy and the universe state that all of that energy will come back to us.  It may not look the same, it may not feel the same, but we will know that it came from us.  The point isn’t to get that recognition—it’s to be the person we need to be so we can encourage others to be who they need to be.  The point is to play our part to the best of our ability and always do the best we can and expand who we are.  That’s enough.  The magic will happen no matter what we do as long as we are aligned.  So don’t worry if we aren’t sure about our growth or impact—keep writing the sticky notes and someday someone else can hold that pen because they saw you write.