Svaha: the time between seeing lightning and hearing the thunder
I will be eternally grateful for your great gift of taking in to the fullest extent what it is that I have to offer, living it, and then reflecting it back in terms of the potential experience of others. You have given words to a process that defies words. And you’re constantly in a position to help me continue to hone that, deeper and deeper and more and more resonantly, who I am and what I offer, which is truly invaluable. — Jon Hansen, The Remembering Room, Richmond, Illinois
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You have an uncanny ability to see through what is being said and surface all the “unsaid” issues. Then you quickly give candid feedback and have a tremendous toolbox to help me move forward through your expert guidance of the right tool.
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A couple of weeks ago, I did something I do once every eighteen months or so: I blew up my computer and rebuilt it. This is less scary than it sounds, and is usually therapeutic for both me and the computer. I get the fun of immersing myself in geekdom for a day, and the computer comes out of it refreshed and running much smoother and faster.
This time, it didn’t go quite as planned. To cut a long story short, I panicked when something small cropped up, and through a sequence of un-thought-out, freaked-out, assumption-fed reactions, I created a huge headache for myself that resulted in doing all the work twice. Blech.
It was not a happy weekend. It was particularly unhappy because I couldn’t immediately respond to requests for help from a client and from my business partner.
But I learned something from it. Something that I already knew, as you probably do also.
Decisions made in haste from a place of fear tend to create problems instead of solving them.
And yet, it’s hard to keep from making assumption-fed reactionary choices.
What do I mean by “assumption-fed”? Nothing complicated: just that when things start going wrong, especially if you’re already a little nervous about what’s happening or what you’re doing, your mind is likely to leap to doom-and-gloom assumptions of the worst possible sort.
In my case, something small and relatively insignificant had gotten screwed up. But when I saw the error message, I immediately doom-and-gloom assumed that it was a fundamental system problem. My reaction to that caused a chain of events that, as I say, led to a real fundamental system problem. (Be careful what you wish for...)
If I’d paused for a moment to look at what was really happening (the system was running fine), and what the real symptoms were (an error message that I could research), I would have saved myself a lot of work, not to mention a beautiful day that I’d planned to spend outside. (Even in San Diego, 80-degree days in January aren’t to be passed up!)
This is an interesting lesson that applies to much bigger and more important things than what was, in the end, mostly an annoyance and a lost day. It’s especially interesting in today’s assumption-filled, doom-and-gloom economy and job market, when much bigger things are at stake than one lost day.
Fear and panic are bad decision-making partners. Like most people, you probably try to push fear and panic away, denying that you really feel them, trying to suppress the surge of anxiety and worry they bring. Of course, that just increases their impact as they work in hiding to undercut your confidence and ability to think clearly.
How do you keep yourself from reacting like this? Here are some steps that work for any stressful situation, whether interpersonal or technical in nature.
It’s hard to stop when you’re feeling rushed. If a deadline is looming and you’re suddenly presented with a problem or dilemma, the urge is to plow through as quickly as you can so that you can still meet that deadline.
Nonetheless, this is the crucial first step. Stop, just for one minute. Acknowledge your feeling of panic, the racing heart, the compulsion to dive in and take action — any action! — as quickly as possible. Acknowledge it, and set it aside for a moment.
What’s really happening? When issues come up suddenly, you may think you know what to do. But when you’re moving fast, you’re almost certainly missing or misinterpreting something.
Look at the problem straight on. What exactly are the symptoms? Be sure you’re not imagining any of them. When I saw that error message, I immediately thought, “The whole thing is broken!” even though the evidence was quite clearly otherwise. In an interpersonal situation, you might be thinking, “This person is completely irresponsible,” when in fact you’re dealing with a simple misunderstanding.
Even if you end up talking to yourself or your cat rather than another person, hearing yourself explain the symptoms and your potential action steps is a powerful way of getting clear on what’s happening. Often solutions will jump out at you as you describe the problem — solutions that hadn’t even crossed your mind before.
So spend a few moments describing what you see, what the possible causes are, and what you might do about it. Be curious and expect to be surprised!
Yes, at last, now you can take action. And if you look back, you’ll see that this process didn’t take very long.
You may also see that you’ve saved yourself a lot of time, trouble, frustration, and confrontation (whether with others or with yourself) by just slowing down for a moment, acknowledging your impulse to panic, and then giving yourself — and the problem — some space to breathe.
“Haste in every business brings failures.” Herodotus, 484BCE - 430BCE, Greek historian regarded as the Father of History for his methodical approach to collecting and testing facts and narrative.
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