Sometimes things don't go your way. How do you respond to adversity? Knowing who you are in times of trouble explains more about you than almost anything else.
Explain how you respond to and handle challenges.
assignment 20
Convenience is an underrated concept. If I have a principal weakness it's that I love convenience a little too much. When I first run across a problem I try to find the most convenient solution.
Sometimes that's good. When I was eight years old, my mother had to remind me to make my bed day after day. I didn't see the point, but spent an entire afternoon inventing a device to make my bed automatically. I never built it, but wouldn't it have been convenient? (A couple of months ago, Mom admitted that she thinks that she should have encouraged me to build it, if only that I would have used it. These days, I make my bed every morning.)
Convenience is also good when I run across frustrating and repetitive work at work. I like to build small tools to fix those problems for me and I build a new tool every couple of weeks.
Another part of my personality really really likes to solve problems. For example, I packed some of my house stuff in plastic grocery bags during the recent move and tied the handles shut. Instead of cutting the knots, as you'd expect, I felt compelled to attack the knots until I'd untied them correctly. My mind wouldn't rest if I left them tied and it wouldn't let me rest if I'd cut the handles on worthless plastic bags I'd turn around and dump in the recycling anyway.
When I'm facing a problem I can't automate and I can't seem not to try to solve, I feel a lot of frustration.
My first response is to try to find a way around the problem. Sometimes, ignoring things makes them go away. Right now, I have a small dispute with a long distance company that I've ignored for a couple of weeks. I know it won't go away on its own, but I really don't want to deal with yet another Fairly Useless Telephone Carrier.
After I decide that ignoring my problem doesn't help, I look around for the easiest way not to deal with it. Can I pass it off on someone else? Will a second round of ignoring fix it? Should I give up on it? I have several friendships that have ended mostly at this stage, where the work of staying in touch or reconnnecting after a fight is more than the perceived worth.
The next step is to plan. I used to be terrible about this, even going over conversations in my head obsessively before starting them, planning every angle. My morning showers have become much more pleasant and much shorter after I forced myself to stop doing this. However, this is one part of my life in which I make detailed plans. Sometimes it helps when I realize how much of the situation is outside of my control or that I've done everything reasonable and within my power to do.
No plan is perfect, though. I've come to realize that even though I'm pretty smart, I won't see the flaws in my ideas until I take them to some friends. Again, there's a line to draw here. It's good to talk things over with people you trust, but it's a real strain on a friendship if you only ever talk to ask for advice or reconfirm an idea over and over. This is also something I had to learn the hard way.
The most difficult part of facing a challenge is waiting. My mind and emotions won't settle when I feel that some conflict has gone unresolved. At its worst, it affects my sleep; I'll start to drift off only to have the thoughts of the potential troubles or consequences of bad results pop into my mind where I have to chase them out again. If they reach my dreams, it's all over.
Maybe the real trick is in figuring out how to be patient. On the surface, it seems like the easiest thing. If there's nothing I can do in a situation that I haven't already done (and if I'm sure that I've done what I can do in the rightest way possible), what more can I do? (Worry, for one.) In practice, it takes a lot more than that.
Sometimes I like to make bargains with myself. They're usually not particularly helpful. They're often quite stupid, perhaps "Self, if you don't eat any sweets today, things will turn out the way you want them to turn out." The only possible way I can see that helping is that it gives me something concrete to blame if things do turn out badly. "If I hadn't eaten tice cream for supper, I wouldn't have run out of gas before the concert."
I do have some healthy habits. Vigorous exercise helps, whether it's lifting weights to loud music for thirty minutes or so or going for a brisk walk around the neighborhood park. I find it much more difficult to worry and to plan while exercising, which gives my mind a break and makes my body tired. Those are both positive.
I'm also capable of being very stubborn. In cases where I apply it wisely, it looks a lot like confident self-discipline. When I really concentrate on ignoring a problem (at the "have dealt with it as much as possible and need to be patient" stage, not the "don't want to deal with it" stage), I allow myself to worry about it for a few minutes every morning and then refuse to worry about it through the rest of the day, going as far as to change the subject in my mind when I start to worry.
It's difficult to do but it's worth doing.
Knowing how I react to challenges has been enlightening. It has helped me face problems I never thought I could face before. I could say the same thing about facing astoundingly terrifying problems, too, but they're a lot less frightening having dealt with them before.
I don't want to deal with any more trouble in my life — it's very inconvenient — but I think I can do so with less fuss and much better skill these days. Even though it cost me a lot of pain trying to solve my problems the wrong way (and trying to solve problems I should have left alone!), I like what I've learned.