Are you sleeping over 'problems'?

Facing emotions or challenges that make us uncomfortable is never easy, but avoiding our problems only compounds our stress and anxiety and confusion arises when minor and uncertain issues occupy more attention than the key problems and higher certainty solutions.

When you can't really take the problems facing you head on, then you have to find ways and means of handling them one by one on the basis of priority, however sleeping over problems will only make the matters worse and when you keep pushing them below your own carpet one day you are sure to trip over it and fall flat on your face.

Many a times we keep looking at our emails, messages, chats or even stupid forwards on our mobile phones just to avoid confronting some problem directly, we could instead finish with the problem first howsoever unpleasant it may sound but that is the right way of doing things correctly. For example, I had a colleague of mine who was in charge of creating graphic designs for our marketing campaigns and all the time he was under time pressure of delivering what was expected of him. Therefore every time I called him to show me what he was ready with he always came back with some excuse of other but delayed the display of graphics to me. Every time I experienced is inefficiency was causing the organisation with inordinate delays. He was always avoiding his problem of no doing things in time by giving excuses.

One fine day I called him and told him that if he was not going to improve his working style for good then I am giving him just one month to improve otherwise find himself a new job. By directly confronting him I invited unpleasantness and became unpopular among the team members because he was around for 5-6 years in the company.

But on directly resolving the issue head on I asked his time for one month and to our surprise his performance improved a lot and we could get the graphics well before the expected time of delivery. This was a good example for myself getting things done on priority by showing little fire under the bottom, and things worked well for us.

We in general are not fond of writing big project reports or case studies because they take too much of our valuable time and we keep postponing them to the next week which never comes. Therefore one of my colleague developed a good technique resolving this issue of procrastination, by deciding that this weekend he would take this project home and will not come to office without finishing it. He worked over night on the weekend and when I saw him back to office with red tired looking eyes I asked him and he smiled and said that " I did not sleep for two nights but finished writing that long project report finally" I saw the report being ready with such a commitment I asked him to go home and take good rest. He needed those few hours of sleep and rest to his tired brain and body so that next day he came back all fresh and thanked me for the day off.

The same thing happened with doing workout at home. Every morning I woke up I felt so lazy of doing exercises that I found some reason or the other for avoiding doing the workout and kept postponing it to next day, but the next day never comes if you keep postponing it. Therefore yesterday on the International Yoga Day I decided in spite of it being Sunday I put the alarm and started doing the Yoga early morning to the surprise of everyone at home. Because like all Sundays I would have been sleeping till 830-9 but because I got motivated by the Yoga Day I got up early and was relaxing after finishing the yoga in the morning and there it started the habit of doing yoga every morning for me.

Therefore friends it is entirely up to us how to look at the problems in the face and take them head on and resolve them instead of keep postponing them to the next day or week. It is now or never really since tomorrow never comes!