Burn your boats, not your bridges!

I love considering the conflicting advice that sits within sayings and idioms. 

I am not sure Cortés ever told his crews to burn their boats when they got to South America – a quick read up suggests that he scuppered the majority of his ships making them unseaworthy (but restorable) so he was able to then indenture his crew into military service rather than cut off retreat…. But I digress – this is not a history lesson. 

I am really torn about whether or not we should ‘burn the boats’.
​​​​​​​
This saying is talking about cutting off your retreat so your only choice is to keep moving forward. From a motivational point of view this is great – and it is no coincidence that I first heard about ‘burning your boats’ from the king of motivation, Tony Robbins. 

But of course when you have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay, having options in the case of failure is a pretty good idea, and it feeds our human need for security. 

I could go on forever about this but – if you use fear setting you will know that there is always another option. It is very very rare that you are ever ‘out of options’ – certainly here in our place and time. However if you are embarking on a new venture, treat it as if there are no other options and there is no turning back.

Personally speaking I have had and do have plenty of options, but if I had kept looking at those options for too long this business would not be here. There have been some seriously hard moments. 
​​​​​​​
From a mindset point of view, for me, the ‘boats were burned’.

When it comes to ‘burning bridges’ the opposite applies. 

The advice not to burn your bridges is usually talking about a more social kind of interaction. It is about friendships and/or professional relationships being cut, rather than escape routes. 

Time and again I see people walking out the door of an organisation and giving their old boss, colleagues and organisation a hard and often public kick in the guts. I have been the victim of this publicly, and it made my blood boil. 

And I will be honest, I have burnt a bridge or two in my time as I’m sure we all have.

The problem with this, especially if public, is that it can start a chain of ‘bad will’ that can deteriorate into a whole lot of pain that serves nobody (except maybe lawyers).

I think that when moving on and growing, we can frame things positively to ourselves, the people we ‘leave behind’, and the rest of the world. I have been really encouraged recently looking at LinkedIn and how colleagues react to people moving on to other roles and businesses. 

We don’t need to put each other down. 
We don’t need to leave burning bridges in our path.