It occurred to me today that there’s something about bats (the flying creatures, not the long wooden baseball implement).

I, through a series of steps which I don’t quite remember, ended up in a conversation with a coworker the other day about bats. I was sharing stories about our couple of experiences with bats in our house (it’s an old house), and she was sharing stories about her experiences –> mostly experiences of discovering bats and having to deal with them, while her husband went into hiding.

As humorous as this conversation was, I realized as we were talking that there are two basic responses to bats. And then, I realized that there are two basic responses to most situations where action is warranted.

* * *

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to do anything like this or not at your place of employment, but I’ve had the unfortunate experience, through the years, of having to do ‘team-building exercises’ at work. Not that all team-building exercises are bad; the problem with a lot of team-building exercises, in my estimation, is that they are so hokey as to be completely unenjoyable. Or, I’ve discovered that many team-building exercises come at you with some ‘scientific approach’, which is neither scientific nor enjoyable.

Several years back, through some process of team-building at work, we ended up taking a personality inventory of sorts, that presumed to tell us what kind of a personality we had. We answered a number of different questions, which was all well and good, but then, the exercise required that we should be grouped together on teams, based on sets of similar responses. At the end of the whole thing, we were supposed to have ended up on teams with people who were like us.

Now, I was useless during the latter part of this ‘team-building exercise’ simply because of what I’d learned during the first part. What I learned on that day got to me on a personal level; it caught me completely off-guard. For whatever reason, the events of that afternoon –and the information that I learned– has been with me ever since.

For, you see, on that afternoon, I discovered that I am an over-thinker.

* * *

Of course, there are certain situations that lend themselves to over-thinking, while others most certainly do not. For example, you wouldn’t want to over-think in an emergency situation, but non-emergency situations would be a more acceptable environment for over-thinking.

The problem with this scenario is that people tend to make poorer decisions in emergency situations, probably because they feel as if they don’t have enough time to be thorough in their thinking.

The last time we had a bat in our house, we discovered it in the middle of the night. We discovered it as it was flying around in our bedroom, right over our heads, waking us up. The first thing we did, my wife and I, was to pull the covers up over our heads. Then my wife said, “What are we going to do?”

This would not have been the time to over-think. But, it was most certainly necessary that a plan –a good plan– be devised so we could move forward. For me, it took a moment to do that.

The plan worked, and we corralled the bat and were able to get rid of it.

I remember thinking, as we were hiding underneath those blankets, that I didn’t have the luxury to weigh several different options, the pros and cons of each of those options, in order to determine which approach was going to result in the highest likelihood of success.

I remember thinking that, despite wanting to over-think that situation, as I do most situations, it was more important to ACT NOW than it was to ACT PERFECTLY. The trick was, in that moment, to understand that the circumstances dictated a different approach.

* * *

There has to be a happy medium, right?!?! If you’ve read this blog for any decent amount of time, you know that I prefer moderation whenever possible (I’ve written about finding the middle ground in THIS POST and THIS POST and THIS POST, among others).

So, if we want to avoid extremes, then I guess I shouldn’t sit around, thinking about something for so long that I lose the chance to be effective in my actions. The other extreme would consist of acting in a situation with such a speed that I haven’t thought about my choices at all, which often results in bad decision-making.

As frustrating as it can sometimes be for people to have to deal with over-thinkers, because of their slowness in reaching decisions, I suspect that those over-thinkers are less often poor decision-makers. The converse of this, of course, is that people of action –as inspiring as they are in their ‘take-charge’ manner of doing things– are probably more likely to be wrong, for not having thought things through.

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned two approaches when a decision needs to be made. Lying under those blankets with that bat flying around above my head, both approaches were obvious to me. A big part of me wanted to just lie there, hoping that the bat would go back to wherever it came from. But, I knew that wasn’t likely to happen. I realized that something was going to need to be done.

In psychology, these choices are referred to as fight or flight.

To be completely honest, I knew that my wife wasn’t going to allow for me to stay under those covers, hiding from the bat, so –in a sense– she motivated me to bravery.

As a matter of fact, she has very often been a driving force in helping me to be the right combination of ‘thinker’ and ‘do-er’.