How do you respond when someone makes life more complicated for you?
Do you ever see it coming before the problems get there? If you do, does that make it easier or harder to deal with?
I’m pretty good at seeing why things might go wrong and developing contingency plans to deal with them. Much of my career has involved problem solving and I’ve found prevention is one of the best ways to deal with most of them. Several of my job titles have even had the word “Planner” in them.
What is it Ben Franklin said? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?
Gorgeous says I’m a bit of a “hole poker”. She says that I poke all kinds of holes in plans and any plan that survives my efforts ends up being a pretty stinking good one. I tend to be pretty good at seeing why things won’t work, and as a result lean toward the “glass half empty” way of looking at things.
I would prefer to be more of an optimist.
But I’m not – yet.
That’s why I get especially frustrated when people do things that become a hassle for me. Way too much of the time I see the hassle heading at me.
Like today. We got called to do a job by a shipping company. The problem is, there are a whole bunch of things that need to happen yet before we can do our part. Some of them have to be done by a vendor of the customer of the company hiring us. And the vendor doesn’t currently have a very solid reputation of coming through.
In the words of Jayne Cobb, “I smell a lot of if coming off this plan.”
I am working at becoming more optimistic. I try to keep in mind that we will still get paid for the job (eventually), and probably even more than if things went smoothly. I try to remember that if it was easy, anyone could do it and they wouldn’t need to hire us in the first place.
But too often my mind reduces the optimism to so much “blah, blah, blah.”
The adage, “A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part” doesn’t really hold true in my line of work. I still get to deal with the emergency. And often it is completely unnecessary.
How do you respond? Do you tend to see how things might work, or what might go wrong?
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Keeping your eyes on the goal (the finished product) can make any obstacle seem miniscule.
I try to stay on the path of optimisim even though it can be challenging.
I agree, David. Perspective and attitude can go a long way toward influencing a desirable outcome.
Chris, keeping that glass half full is always a challenge. Tom Vander Well has asked me, “how did you become an optimist”? While I haven’t constructed the long answer yet for my blog, I can tell you this – I was lucky to have initial mentors early in my career that were relentlessly optimistic, to the point where “can’t” was just not a part of their vocabulary. That may be a key, just simply “drafting” off of another optimist (or multiple optimists, and there’s a lot of good ones out there in the blogosphere). So hang out with us Chris, you never know!
You become like the people you associate with. I think it’s John Maxwell who calls that the law of attraction.
The Bible says, “Bad company corrupts good character.”
Either way I think yours is good advice, Starbucker. I think I will!
I start to worry that if I don’t say something I will be guilty of letting things go astray, because I knew and kept quiet. Yet I often I don’t feel it’s my place to take the reins and tell people. So sometimes I avoid situations where I’ll have an opinion about how things should go, thinking that I got my chance to learn and now it’s their chance to learn too–they don’t need to learn my way, no one will die or be left hungry if I let them learn on their own.
I wake up every morning thinking today is one more chance to do it right and get it going. I have no idea where I got endowed with so much hope.
Liz, I’ve had experiences where I’ve let my friends down when I saw a bad situation developing yet didn’t say anything because I wasn’t sure my insight would be received well.
Now I speak up where I can and let go of the responsibility of how the message will be received. I look at giving a warning not so much as taking the reins, but more as holding up a caution sign as they go by holding their own reins. There are some lessons are better not learned first hand if at all possible.
The trick is to give the warning in a kind, softer tone to reduce the chances that it is rejected outright without the person actually giving the issue some thought. As Gorgeous says, sometimes it’s all about the tone. At least for me it is anyway.
Chris,
I would always speak to my friends. I was thinking of those I work with. That’s when I step aside sometimes and let them have their own turn at learning. No one dies and no one goes hungry.
Sometimes I look better in the shadows.
Oh, I totaly get that, Liz. There sure are different levels of relationships that call for differing responses. But that could be a whole new post…
A whole new post! What a great idea!
Chris ~ I tend to look at both sides.
My mind races to see what might go wrong, what is solid about the plan. I’ve always considered my making “contigent” plans not a matter of being pessimistic but realistic. Rather than looking at a situation and feeling you could have been more optimistic, you could think of it as – you expect things to go smooth but only with a better plan. You want and expect success but planning is the key.
Being able to look at a plan to see what will work and not work makes you aware of the potential obstacles BEFORE they happen. Maybe I don’t consider it a negative trait because it is my way. It wasn’t always how I did things. Over time we learn from our mistakes and the watching other plans fall apart because the plan wasn’t well thought out.
As for telling others what could or will go wrong – I reserve that to people that I’m close to in life OR people that have the ability to impact my life. I simply don’t want to take on potential problems that don’t belong to me.
I think the problem is when it bogs us down or keeps us from working toward our goals. Starbucker is right – being around people that are able to keep their eye on the prize without being dragged down by what can go wrong makes life and work easier to take.
Tammy, I guess it comes down to a question of expectancy. Notwithstanding how you plan, do you expect things to go wrong? Or do you expect things to go well.
That is the optimism I am looking for because our expectancy often creates our outcome.