This thought has been very appropriate for me in the last week as I’ve been battling with some IT issues that have tested my patience and patience has never been one of my strongest features.
I decided to teach myself how to use Photoshop Elements to create an image for my blog header (do you like the final result?). I hit the first obstacle when the button I needed was greyed out so it was off to the Photoshop help desk to get the very useful reply of our response time is 3 days and sorry your product is 6 months old so we now longer support it, please try installing the software again…
At this stage I allowed my frustration to get the better of me as I hate to hit a brick wall on an issue. In my mind there is always some solution but I couldn’t see it this time. I wasn’t able to reinstall the software as it was in a box in storage in a different city. The only option that was open to me was to find some open source software, muttering to myself as I went that I’d paid good money for Photoshop so I shouldn’t need to doing this. My annoyance at having to potentially learn two different systems caused me to think to myself, “I’ll just try Photoshop one more time”. Well, what do you know the button was no longer greyed out! It still took me a long time to get the end result but at least I could get started and learn from my mistakes as I went.
My second IT issue occurred while trying to create sub pages in WordPress; I deleted the wrong piece of code so all my pages disappeared! I had also made the cardinal mistake of not having a back up of the original code. I reached out to my more knowledgeable friends and it was this action that got my mind thinking again, “Where else might the original code be?” Light bulb moment!! I installed the theme on another one of my blogs, went into the control panel and there was the code I needed. It turns out that I’d deleted a pair of brackets – problem fixed in 5 minutes (well actually 2 hours – oh New Zealand broadband why are you so slow?).
So the lessons that I have learnt from the last week are:
- Find an expert to help with the unfamiliar. It saves you a lot of time and stress if you ask questions before you leap in or have someone else do the work for you.
- Allowing fear, panic or frustration to take over means there your mind is closed to creating logical solutions. Find some way to allow your mind to work freely; for me this is going for a long walk.
- Adjust your attitude. The difference between how I felt with my Photoshop experience (frustrated – this should be simple!) to how I felt with my theme coding experience (actually laughing at how silly I had been not to do a back up first) were worlds apart. The only thing that had changed was my attitude and my belief in myself that I could get this fixed.
- How can I avoid this happening next time? I’m always trying to learn about how I can improve my business processes and myself which means a hard, honest look needs to be taken when things go wrong. Because my first reaction is to do everything myself I sometimes forget to ask the important questions; “Is the best use of my time doing this task or should I outsource or delegate the work?” and “Is what I’m doing really important or have I got side tracked from my goals?”
Frustrating days and projects will always come up in business (and in life) and it’s a case of learning to manage your thinking so that your mind has the calmness to logically find a solution.
The following is a quote from His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
that I always have sitting on my desk:
Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country is spend developing the mind instead of the heart
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends but to everyone
Be compassionate
Work for peace in your heart and in the world
Work for peace and I say again
Never Give up
No matter what is happening
No matter what is going on around you
Never Give up
I was fortunate enough to meet him briefly in 2003 in Dharamsala, Northern India while I was travelling. He has always interested me as he struck me as a man who wasn’t bitter about the challenges that life had thrown at him. In fact he had retained a boyish interest in the world. When I joined the line of others waiting for his blessing he looked like a kid at his birthday party, so completely happy that so many people had come to see him. I will never forget his beautiful smile.
