Anyone who knows me well would know that I have been through some pretty hefty problems in the last year. I’m sure that many people are having problems that are more difficult than mine, but I have had some really gnarly issues and so I believe I have learned some very powerful skills that I can share.
Here are some examples of problems that I have faced in one year:
- I was pregnant but unexpectedly had a premature baby at 25 weeks
- My baby survived but I was informed that he was going to be quadriplegic
- We found ourselves in an incident that caused us to lose our car, which was more of a problem as I had to get to the hospital every day
- I returned to work and found there was no work for me to do in my normal role and that I would have to do different work that I didn’t want to do
- My husband lost his job due to massive company layoffs
- We experienced a complete breakdown of our relationship with my husband’s family
- I left my job and found a new one, but accidentally picked a place where the staff had very low morale and I felt very unhappy
- My husband stopped talking to me due to his grappling with the issues, and we were heading for a divorce
- My husband left to take a job interstate, and I had to stay back and prepare the house for sale (which was scaring me at the time as the yard had been quite neglected)
- I had to find a new home for our pets
- I had to find a new job and home in a new city
And now…
My husband has changed his mind and wants to move back but I have already sold the house and quit my job. Essentially I am homeless and unemployed!
Fortunately I know how to keep a clear head, and even though I am clearly not immune to the snowball effect where one problem leads to another and another and another (who says problems only fall in threes?) I have realised that I do actually have a talent for being resourceful and getting difficult problems resolved.
When I say ‘resolved’ however, it doesn’t mean fixed forever and ever, because the effects of some problems can lurk in the unconscious and come out when least expected. No, when I say resolved I mean accomplishing what is within my circle of influence in such a way as to stop the pain now and to prevent the same specific issue from affecting me in the future.
I believe there are some problem solving practices that when used go a long way towards resolving all sorts of issues. I use these skills every day in my work as a computer programmer, and fortunately they apply just as well to real-life problems, not just the technical kind.
In this post I’m going to gloss over the emotional side of my recent experiences and just talk about techniques. But I should explain, following specific techniques for solving problems does not mean that you will avoid experiencing pain. When you experience such turbulence in your life as I have recently, and I’m sure that you have experienced it too, you learn to live with the pain and plough through it anyway. Problems can make you cry, they can make you angry, they can make you depressed, they can even make you crazy. But if your emotional pain stops you from being able to move though and solve a problem, then finding a way to transcend your pain needs to be the first problem to solve.
So all that said, how have I been able to prepare myself mentally, to transcend my pain so that I can tackle these major issues?
The first thing I have found is that I need to separate my pain from my problem solving. Sadness and grief and guilt and fear will come and go, and during the times that they come I let myself give in to them and experience them. But these are not the same times that I try to solve problems. This is because you don’t want a ‘bounce’. A bounce is where you rush at the easiest solution because you’re in so much emotional pain that you just want it to stop. Then after a short period of time you realise that your solution was panicked and not what you really want, resulting in you having to claw your way back to where you were before.
Sometimes you can’t avoid these bounces or try hard to solve a problem and don’t realise that the solution is poor, so if it happens you haven’t failed, you just have another problem to solve. For example, when my husband lost his job we had to choose between what he wanted to do and where he wanted to live. When he was offered a position doing what he wanted to do but in a different city, we thought it would be a good idea for him to take it and start a new life in a different place. But we didn’t comprehend the size of the task ahead. Trying to be happy in a new place when gripped with a lot of turbulence, with your wife in a different city when the new city requires a dramatic change in lifestyle is a real challenge, and so in the end we have decided to move back. But now in order to move back we both have to find work and we now have to find a home without already living somewhere first. The size of the bounce (in this case the bounce being an unplanned interstate move) reflects the size of the rebound needed to get back to ‘normal’.
If these bounces happen to you as well, just forgive yourself and move on, they happen to the best of us, all we can do is try to avoid them next time. I would recommend against making any sudden lifestyle changes while in the midst of other emotional challenges; dealing with the two things at the same time could wear you out.
OK, so lets say you are experiencing a reflective time where the emotions have temporarily passed, and you are facing a problem that needs to be solved. (By the way, I suggest that seeking such reflection by reducing the number of activities that you do during troubled times is a good idea. Otherwise if you’re go go go all the time, you will find that all your emotion rushes back when you’re alone and you never get a good chance to separate your pain from your problem solving.) By thinking reflectively and openly about your problem, you are likely to experience a sense of overwhelm. Being a bit anxious by nature, I know that I commonly experience overwhelm when thinking about problems.
An obvious example that comes to mind is when I had to prepare my house for sale recently. I had spent three months in limbo from June to September last year, spending half of my day in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) and the other half of the day expressing breast milk and trying to cheer myself up. My husband wasn’t in any better shape; he threw himself into working long hours so that he could earn more income for our family. Well as a result the yard became a real mess. Shrubs were taking over, there were weeds growing everywhere, even the entire paved area was covered with weeds. Trees were dropping the leaves in our gutters, blocking them, vegetables I had been tenderly growing were abandoned and left to dry out in the sun, the lawn reached to our knees. It was a terrible sight, and because I was working on more significant problems the only thing I could do was pretend the issue didn’t exist. Well six months later it wasn’t looking any better, but now I had to sell the house. Every time I stepped outside and looked at what I had to tackle I was flooded with overwhelm and had to go back inside where it was safe.
I think it is a safe bet to say that the size of your overwhelm is related to the amount of inexperience you have with solving a particular problem. Take heed, everyone has to solve problems that they have never before experienced, so if you are going through feelings of overwhelm at the moment you are not alone. Overwhelm is a significant inhibitor to progress however, and must be beaten. Overwhelm stops you in your tracks like a frightened animal caught in the headlights. You feel stuck, panicked and unable to make any decisions. Tackling the overwhelm is the first thing that must be done whenever there is a problem to be solved.
To get through overwhelm there are two things that you must do: firstly put your blinkers on, and secondly break the problem down into smaller chunks. Read part 2 next
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