Sometimes you just need to keep pedaling

When I was a student, the head of our touristic club unexpectedly offered to go on a bike trip - until then we had walked exclusively on foot. We ended up cycling more than 600 km for 6 days in our native region.

Then there was a big break in such trips. It continued when I got a family, and my wife and I began to organize our own bicycle trips, including those with our kids. My daughter first rode with us in the Netherlands when she was 10 years old, and my son even earlier - at the age of 8 he was already "conquering" roads and paths in Estonia.

The most difficult thing about biking is to maintain a psychological state of mind, to keep pedaling when you're already exhausted and want to quit. It is especially difficult to encourage a child who is capricious (and sometimes this happens even with adult participants of the trip). Wanted or not, but it is necessary to reach the designated point. To distract my son from his difficulties, I usually start a conversation about something he's interested in, like a mobile game he's into now or his favorite cartoon series. When my son is engrossed in the conversation, he forgets about his fatigue and keeps pedaling.

I had to do practically the same thing when I was running the company. During the high season, when large orders came in from wholesale partners, the team worked with double the workload. And it was necessary to motivate the employees on a regular basis not to give up and keep working through "I can't". Sometimes, when the warehouse workers could no longer handle the high stress (perhaps not so much physically as emotionally) we would join them to label boxes of product together.

While doing monotonous work, we also talked about life issues, which helped us understand each other better. People are touched when they see a manager working on a par with them, the emotional intensity subsides, complaints stop, and it is possible to “move mountains”.

There comes a time in any of our lives when you have to keep doing something, no matter how tired you are. And no matter how monotonous the action may be. Let's just say to keep pedaling. Of course, it's important to understand what you're doing it for and where you're going, literally or figuratively. But setting specific (understandable-measurable-achievable...) goals is a separate big topic.