PhotoCredit: Lait
I somehow managed to delete all my google chrome profiles yesterday. I thought I was doing some smart computer maintenance. I ended up wiping all my shortcuts. While recoverable in the long term, I was seeing hours of work ahead of me. Nothing like creating a project for yourself!
Thankfully a meeting was pushed out 30 minutes and I had time to work through my crisis. That, and, I had a moment of clarity where I realized how I could restore it.
Not all messes can be so swiftly cleaned up. I reflected on the day when our building manager fell though our kitchen ceiling mid-pandemic. My kitchen bathed in 100 year-old distgustingness. That drama took hours to clean up.
We are regularly confronted by variations on the spilled milk theme. Years ago I developed a three-step "don't panic" system that I deploy in such occasions.
Step One: Name what happened. I find that it helps me a lot if I zoom out of the problem. Step back and name the issue. Categorize it as a tech issue, or a deep clean, or a "I have to get someone to the emergency room" situation. Hopefully it's not the latter. When we go to emotion first we diminish our ability to cope because we are compounding the issue with our feelings. Leave that for later, preferably over a glass of wine.
Step Two: Calmly acknowledge that you are pissed-the-F-off about the situation. While we don't want to get bundled up in our emotions we also don't want to pretend they don't exist. So I usually give myself a moment to quietly exclaim to myself that this was not in my plans for the day and then I take a deep breath. The reality is that stuff goes wrong from time to time. It's part of the making of the cake of life that we need to break some eggs. If it's happening daily then you might need to do a bigger assessment of what's happening in your life. That will need to be a bigger/longer blog. Step Two is designed to acknowledge the feels but not drown in them.
Step Three: Step away for a moment. My meeting being delayed 30 minutes gave me the time to do the most critical step in the process. By literally removing yourself from the situation you give yourself space for your brain to connect a few dots. We tend to get entangled in the problem and, frankly, we end up making a bigger mess. When I stepped away yesterday I realized I could check my chrome settings on my ipad and copy them over to my laptop. Instantly I solved the issue. My kitchen clean up on the other hand took a lot more work BUT in my stepping away from that I saw the opportunity to do a deep clean of my kitchen. When I viewed the issue through that lens I ended up feeling satisfied at the end of the process rather than angry or hard-done-by.
Obviously, if the issue is of the "drive someone to emergency" variety you want to move through these steps quite quickly but you do still want to do them. Acknowledging your inevitable fear and anxiety, taking a breath, and then step away for a nanosecond to assess the practicalities of the situation. Rushing out the door without your phone and charger, a warm sweater or your wallet is likely going to make your issue worse not better.
When a crisis hits, big or small, panic is not your friend. Perspective is.