Do you struggle when you’re confronted with difficulties? Try these five tips to work through your pain barriers successfully
Overcoming difficulties in order to achieve success is all part and parcel of daily life.
Finding extra money to pay for unexpected major car repairs, doing an urgent task of which you have no previous experience, passing the exams needed to progress onto the career ladder. All can feel like daunting obstacles.
But if left unchecked, daunting feelings can spiral out of control into feelings of helplessness, inadequacy and failure.
So, how can you make your obstacles a little less daunting and work through your pain barriers in an easier and more effective way?
1. Stop and observe how the world works
The modern world is made up of millions of individual processes. Take the processes required to get your morning cappuccino. Planting, harvested and packing the coffee are but a few. There’s also the marketing, transportation and financing. And that’s before you’ve even started the task of getting the milk of your preferred type to mix with the coffee, or the manufacture of the espresso machine!
Without each individual process, there would be no cappuccino to be drunk. Ultimately, each part of the supply chain is crucial to the final product in your coffee cup.
When faced with a difficult task, whilst it may feel overwhelming at the time, take comfort from the fact that producing other products or services involves completing lots of difficult tasks too. Turn the difficulty on its head into an opportunity for you to build and practice the competencies and efficient ways of working that will allow you to approach more difficult tasks with greater ease in the future. Nobody wants you to fail at what you’re doing, so just do your best with the task in front of you and learn from that experience for next time.
2. Don’t play the victim
When confronted with a difficulty, it can be easy to play victim and say ‘why me’? Why has my car broken down, why didn’t someone else get this ‘crappy task’ to do, why do I have to do such stupid exams? Why, why why?!!
Unfortunately, having this ‘why me’ argument with yourself achieves absolutely nothing apart from winding yourself up and it just makes the task ahead of you worse, because you are focused on the mental battle going on inside your head, rather than focusing on tackling the task.
However, avoiding thinking of yourself as the ‘wronged’ and accepting the situation for what it is puts the task at hand into perspective. Yes, that task might be difficult or uncomfortable. But the pain of paying a big car repair bill, working through a difficult task or finishing an exam will be temporary.
Keep a cool head. Ultimately paying more than you had budgeted for to have your car made roadworthy is always preferable to driving a dangerous wreck, completing a task on time can help you to retain and grow business and good exam grades can help you get noticed by future employers. No pain, no gain.
3. Get stuck in!
When confronted with something you’d rather not have or do, it can be easy to slip into a state of despair and expect that someone or something else will always come to your rescue. But life isn’t like that and there won’t always be a knight in shining armour or other super-hero to take your pain away!
So, when confronted with a difficult situation there’s no option – you have to commit to the cause of working through the problem. Or the problem just grows bigger and spirals out of control.
When the kitchen heats up and you have a packed restaurant full of diners to serve, you have to roll up your sleeves, get your pans on, get stuck in and cook your socks off! If you focus on committing to the cause and engage with the cause, the process of working through the pain barrier will take care of itself.
Go to any Michelin starred kitchen and at the end of service, amidst the shiny cleaned down workbenches, you won’t see the effort and the pain barriers that were worked through to deliver excellence because all of the chefs were fully committed to the cause. So perhaps ask yourself this – are you willing to get stuck in and work like a Michelin starred chef or will you leave your worktop covered in wet blancmange at the end of service?
4. Keep it in perspective
Working through a tricky scenario well always requires a sense of perspective. How does what you’re doing fit into your wider personal or business objective? Is what you’re doing actually going to help your wider cause or create mayhem down the line? When combined with the work of others around you is your current joint effort the most effective way of reaching your desired outcome?
21st century technology has given us with apps which automatically sense whether a house is too warm or cold and allow you to adjust the temperature from afar so that you arrive home to the perfect climate. But when humans sense that things might be veering of track, we’re sometimes reluctant to upset the apple cart and instead, we stay on a less desirable path, with less desirable outcomes. We blatantly ignore one of our best and most reliable apps, our own common sense!
Working through a pain point successfully requires the ability to maintain perspective at all times – always ask yourself, why am I flying through turbulence if I can move to a different altitude and steer a simpler, less bumpy course?
5. Turn up every day
Actors become great actors through practice. Tennis players become Wimbledon champions by continuously working on every aspect of their game. Businesses become more successful by acknowledging and working through their pain points.
When any actor, tennis player or business starts out in life, success is never guaranteed. The gold at the end of the rainbow is not a divine right. But that gold will come closer into reach by sticking at it, persevering and turning up every day.
The distractions of modern life provide a huge excuse not to turn up and engage in the practice needed to improve, develop and stay at the top of one’s game. Moreover being distracted means that we engage in distraction, rather than putting in the effort needed to work through our pain barriers.
However, if you turn up and commit to the practice of working through difficult things every day, over time, the difficult becomes less difficult and ultimately becomes child’s play. Why? Because you are fully immersed in the process of learning through experience and discovery, rather than avoiding and hiding from problems through lack of engagement.
Don’t fear the unknown – use it as your friend!
Some people get stuck in a big rut when faced with a difficult or uncomfortable situation because their default mode is fear of the unknown and fear of the consequences of the unknown. However, it needn’t be that way.
Life and work will always throw up new and difficult challenges, but the secret is to engage in the challenge and see where it takes you. If you want to become a musician, but never take the violin out of its case, you’ll never work through the pain of daily practice and will never reach your goal. Similarly, if you want to advance your career or business in any other walk of life you need to ‘take the instrument out of its case’ each and every day and practice finding solutions to problems.
Yes, some challenges might feel like you’re climbing Mount Everest and almost impossible, but as with climbing to the top of any summit, be it mountainous or professional, you just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other until you find yourself on top of your world.
