Embracing Change -- December 2016

Spending any amount of time on a social media platform like Twitter is akin to having all your conversations in a community hall, everyone can hear you and anyone can chip in. Actually, judging by some of the opinions sent in my direction it’s more like talking in a public bar, I swear half the people are well on their way to being drunk.

There’s something about the relative anonymity of a computer screen and keyboard that emboldens people to share their view on everything. I’ve seen people explain earthquake proofing to civil engineers, describe the Electoral College System to political scientists who live in America, and of course not a week goes by without some urbanite educating me on best practice farming methods.
You have to learn to ignore the bulk of the interruptions or you risk being sucked into never ending arguments about the right way to peel an orange or, far worse, endless lectures on exactly why Andrew Little is the saviour of the Labour Party (spoiler: he’s not).

There are some gems out there, and some fantastic advice on all manner of things if you just ask the right questions. And that’s the flip side; it’s also much easier to ask for advice from the relative anonymity of the computer screen than it is in real life.
Asking for advice can be hard, especially in your professional life when you know you’re doing your best and can’t for the life of you see how you could be doing anything different to improve things. Finding the right advice for you can be harder still.

For decades now DairyNZ have provided discussion groups as a means of getting ideas and advice to farmers, but I always found they were much like Twitter: a nice day out with lots of opinions floating around but hard to pick the right advice for me.
As an infrequent user of DairyNZ resources I was surprised to get an email from them asking to interview me. They wanted to know how I’d taken a Mid Canterbury dairy farm from average performance to a sustainable 18% increase in production with a corresponding drop in expenses. They’re interviewing a whole range of farmers in a whole range of systems, trying to find the best advice to put in front of farmers.

I told them that number one factor in getting a positive result was the willingness to change: unsolicited advice and opinions wash over you and wear you down, but once you decide you want to change seeking the right advice become much easier.
The second most important thing is finding someone you trust. Be it buying a car or running a farm, taking advice can be daunting. It took us two attempts to find the person that was the right fit for me but it was worth the effort to keep looking, the rewards were immense.

The opportunity to change is there for all of us if that’s what you want, and now more than ever the resources to do so are at our fingertips. Taking stock of where you are and where you want to be can be scary, but taking the first steps and doing it can be exhilarating. Just take the time to find the right people to listen to, and filter out the weirdos on the internet!