Topic Tuesday #72 2013/12/03 - "Problem Management"

Topic Tuesday #72 2013/12/03 - "Problem Management"

We all have problems. Some are small like what to wear, what kind of salad dressing to use, where you left something, or if you left a poor impression. Some are large problems. Sometimes, my small problem will be monumental to someone else, and my greatest issue - insignificant to the right person.

Some words of advice:

We all share the same world.
We all are born & we will all die.
We all eat and drink and feel, though all differently.
"Enough" is relative.
There will always be someone with more and someone with less, than you. You are always going to be somewhere inbetween because the value of "things" change as you change. You can't eat a trophy. You can't drink a computer.
In the end, even the richest person in the world has something that he would trade their empire for one more moment of. You won't be taking anything with you, certainly nothing material.
Love will come and go. Friendship will do the same. Even family, is fluid.
Everyone is having a hard time with something. Being kind, goes much further than you will ever know, until someone is kind to you.
The sun will come up on our home world tomorrow as it has for all of recorded history an beyond, and lucky for us, it will continue to do so for billions of years more.

That is the human component of our shared existence. Materialisim, empathy, compassion, and mortality.
We all have our problems. Whatever is it, be it the right outfit to wear when you meat a prospective employer for the first time at a lunch and making sure to order the right dressing that won't dribble down your chin and stain that carefully chosen garment.... or whether or not to call someone or wait for them to apologize first, keep in mind that the human element is at work all around you, and is very complex.
You are not alone.

On to the management part of the problem.
A saying that I enjoy from the world of business project management, "you can't DO a project. You can only do tasks that will complete the project one step at a time." Or from myth, how do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.
Break it down. Whatever it is, it has smaller parts. Yes, they all go together to make an enormous scary boogyman, but where you can't defeat the boogyman, you can undress him. (Sorry for the visual, I didn't know you knew the boogyman. Awkward... anyway...)
Disect your boogyman into manageable steps. A list is a great tool. Just tick off the things that you can address about the boogyman.
Shoes, pants, coat, hat, gloves. Then address them one by one.
You'll often find you missed things, it's ok.
He had a vest on under the coat, and what looks like an ascot.  He's wearing other things, and you just keep taking them off until you have the boogyman defenseless.
Eventually your problem, your issue, your fear, your boogymen, will be taken care of.
     One
          step,
               at
                    a
                         time.

No problem, we're only human.