Have you ever hit a squirrel while driving?

We don’t need to get into the gross details of what happened after but let’s take a second to ponder what happens first. There you are driving down the road, listening to music or chatting with your family. You see the squirrel and, if you’re not a bad human, you slow down a bit. You’re watching him. He’s doing whatever a squirrel does.

Then there’s that moment of indecision. Squirrels are infamous for it. Taking 10 steps forward then 5 steps back to figure out what side of the street they want to be on. That’s probably why the jokes about crossing the street are about chickens and not squirrels – at least the chickens make a damn decision eventually.

You hit the squirrel at least once in your life. You feel guilty. You gasp in horror at that really awful “bump” under the tire. The next thing that happens, if you have an audience, is that you blame the squirrel for being indecisive.

Somehow, I construed this as a metaphor for life sitting in the back seat of the Volvo this weekend. It made me think of work, life and all the things in between that we make decisions on every day. How indecision costs us. Thankfully, not our lives as was the case of that sad little squirrel, but we know that in the bigger picture the consequences of indecision inevitably make life harder. Rather than making choices more clear, it complicates our decisions with more information.

We’re constantly talking about strategies and segments of our duties as recruiting and HR professionals – sourcing, candidate experience, employee engagement etc – when in reality, a lot of us just need to focus on ourselves. Understand that credibility is more important than a title printed on a business card. Earning credibility, however, is hard. It takes a series of the right decisions to show people your instincts are on.

And if you’re pacing, you’re likely to get squashed – not saved.

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