Every day I find myself talking to people either at work or while working on Casual Marketer who are complaining about some tool they don’t have, some skill they don’t posses or something they don’t know.
When I run across this behaviour my natural inclination is to try and offer solutions or suggestions to help these people move forward, but sometimes these folks are so stuck that it’s almost impossible to help them.
There’s probably some great psychological reason for their behaviour. Maybe they lack self confidence or self-esteem, they could have an inferiority complex or perhaps they didn’t get enough hugs as a child, who knows, I’m not Freud.
As soon as I see this behaviour in someone and they have a complete unwillingness to snap the hell out of it, I thank them for the invitation to their little pity party and I move along.
Some People Are Like Vampires
This type of person is like a vampire. They will suck every last drop of optimism out of you and leave you feeling spent while they move on to feed on the next unsuspecting person who tries to help them.
There are times where we all get a little defeated and start feeling sorry for ourselves. With that comes a loss of perspective and we can get a little negative when this happens. You know the drill, finding the cloud amongst the silver lining.
When you see this in yourself, you just have to snap out of it. Seriously, wake up to what you’re doing and sort yourself out. To quote the late, great Will Rogers, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
Most of the time, what’s happened is the person has just lost perspective. I see this all the time with my coaching clients. They’ve run into a problem, they’ve tried to push through, they’ve run out of answers and they get frustrated.
If you can get them to stop, take a deep breath and focus on the destination rather than the pothole they just ran over, then that’s a good first step. Once someone realizes that it’s not all that doom and gloom, they can normally get themselves out of the hole that they’re in and go forward.
At the end of the day though, you just have to work with what you’ve got.
Picking The Lock Of Persistence
We moved into the house we currently live in about six years ago. When we moved in the previous occupants had lost the keys to the locks on the bathroom window in our ensuite. The first couple days it didn’t annoy me, but by the end of the first week it was really bugging me.
There’s no way you call a locksmith for that, you’d spend a silly amount of money for the guy to pop open the lock and I’d still have to replace it myself. I went to Bunnings (a big hardware retailer here in Australia) and asked their staff if they knew of a solution. They of course told me to call a locksmith and were generally clueless. I even tried a bunch of luggage lock keys or anything that even remotely looked like it would fit into the keyhole, all without success.
I just kept getting more frustrated every time I’d go into that bathroom. Finally, I looked at the window and I thought to myself, “What can I do to fix this problem?”
I hopped on Google and searched, “unlock bathroom window”. The first result was a YouTube video of a guy picking a bathroom window lock. I’d never thought of picking the lock. I pressed play on the video and it was an Aussie bloke talking about how his “missus” had gone and lost the keys on him, so he decided to MacGyver himself an answer.
Within 10 seconds this fella had this window lock open.
Work With What You Have!
The tools he used were literally sitting on our bookcase in our bedroom. It was like someone had placed them there. It was so weird.
I figured I’d have a go, so I watched the video again, took a shot at picking this lock and even faster than the bloke in the video, my window lock was open. I ran around screaming like I’d just solved a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded with my feet.
That was a long story to basically, say this… Work with what you have. There’s no point complaining about what you don’t have or envying other people’s good fortune, just knuckle down, focus and use the tools at your disposal.
And one tool that you should have at your disposal is the Casual Marketer Monthly Newsletter. Every month you’ll get sage advice and incredible wisdom from your’s truly, delivered right to your home post box. Don’t be the person who’s neck deep and still digging a hole, click below to sign up for the newsletter and get yourself moving forward.