The key to pushing through obstacles

“Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.”

— Eckhart Tolle

After much debate, consternation, and cogitation, the decision was made. The only way to make sure that one of our contractors had been compliant in their selling practices of our financial products and that they were compliant with the terms of the contract between us was to listen to a large number of their sales calls over a period of time. There was no way to automate this. Technology had not advanced far enough where a computer can understand context and emotions.

My heart sank as I realised that the only team that was independent enough to do this work diligently and without bias was my team. My heart sank further when I looked at our work schedule and realised that it is already full. For us to get through the inventory of calls to listen to, I’d also have to get involved. 200 phone calls each.

I begged, borrowed, and stole resources to participate in this ‘fun’ listening activity. While more resources are always better, I am conscious, the more people that are involved, the more difficult it would be for everyone to be consistent in their interpretations. I landed on four helpers from other teams. That still leaves 200 calls for me to listen to.

I looked at the list of 200 in front of me. Each call has a unique code, consultant name, call time, and duration. I scanned through the list. The shortest call was 30 minutes long. My mind was desperately searching for a smarter solution. Surely, there must be a smarter way to do this than to manually listen to them all. I must’ve sat there for a good two hours, Googling to find whether others have done it faster and easier. There were a lot of tools that promise the world, but even if they could deliver on what they promised on the box, it would take months to setup.

I didn’t have months. I had a week!

After a good five hours to frantic research, I resigned myself to the fact that I had to manually listen to them all. I put on my headphones, sat down, and pressed play. But before the hour was finished, I had finished the first 10 calls. It actually wasn’t that bad. It was interesting to observe other people’s conversations, seeing all the different consultant’s styles, and the different types of customers that call in. I pressed on. By the end of the two hours, I had done 20 calls. I was going through them faster because I knew what it was I was looking for now, I knew which bits I could skip, and which bits to listen out for. Soon, I was looking forward to one call finishing and moving onto the next call. When I finished the 50th call, I looked up around the office and it was almost empty (save the usual late stayers). It was already 6PM. I almost didn’t want to stop. I wanted to keep going. But home duties meant I had to leave it there. But why did something that appeared so mundane, so mind-numbingly boring, actually became fun? It you had read the book “The Power of NOW” by Eckhart Tolle, you would know why. It’s because I got to a point where:

I accepted the situation without judgement of whether it was good or bad.

The NEGATIVITY trap

Nobody gets what they want, the way they want it, every single time. Things happen to you in life. They are neither good nor bad. You get caught in traffic, you get stuck with a shitty date, you step on dog poo. These things happen to the most average of us, just as much as to the most successful of us. But we almost always assign a negative meaning to them because they are unwanted, unanticipated events that we see as stopping us from getting to whatever it is we want. Especially when we’ve had a bad day, we think “what else can go wrong next”?

But the more we focus on judging the event, trying to avoid the actions needed to go around them, the more time is spent being focused on them and the negativity we’ve assigned them.

Our minds zero in on this negative meaning and have no capacity left to deal with anything else, much less figure the action needed to get out of it. Want an example? Have you ever been cut off by another car or in Australia, you are slowed down by a group of selfish cyclists who refuse to ride in the bike lane right next to them? They ride slowly up the hill while you can’t change lanes because other vehicles have seen your predicament and have all changed lanes before you? By the time you do get to change lanes, you realise the light ahead has turned red and now you’re stuck there for the next 90 seconds. You’re so angry at this point you could just mow them down in your car. Then you zoom off, hoping that they ingest your exhaust. But once you’ve calmed down, you realise that you didn’t even know if the light had turned green when you zoomed off. You can’t remember if you checked your rear view mirror before changing lanes. You can’t remember how many cyclists there were. What happened? You brain was so focused on the negative meaning you’ve assigned to being stuck behind a bunch of overweight middle aged men in lycra, and your anger, that it had zero capacity to remember anything else.

Take a similar situation at work, where you’re faced with a perceived negative event? In such a state, how would you have any brain power left to think of a smart way to tackle the problem? You wouldn’t.

The POWER of ACCEPTANCE

When undesirable events happen, treat them as just events. They are neither good nor bad. Accept that the event is in front of you and divert you brain power towards finding a path past the event. Acceptance is the key word as per The Power of NOW:

In the state of surrender (acceptance), you see clearly what needs to be done, and you take action, doing one thing at a time and focusing on one thing at a time.

When you accept the situation as something you have to deal with (as unwanted as it is) then your mind has the capacity to focus on the actions to get across them.

In my call listening situation, I spent hours desperately Googling for a solution. The sad fact was, I already knew that there was no automated solution. Yet, I was putting off taking the actions I needed to take because I saw this unplanned task as unwanted and I was hoping that by some miracle, somebody would take it away from me. During those hours of Googling, I was asking in my head any number of permutations of the following: “why me”, “this is not a good use of my intelligence”, “this is beneath me”. But none of these thoughts helped in any way to deal with the task at hand.

Now, acceptance doesn’t mean that you just give in. It doesn’t mean that you push down any negative emotions that arise. To feel anger, self pity, frustration, etc. is to be human. Let those emotions rise up, don’t suppress them. But take control and don’t let them feed off each other and continue to rise. Put a time limit of self pity.

Acknowledge in your head that you are feeling angry. Acknowledge that the situation is unplanned and unexpected. Then say to yourself, that I am angry because this event has occurred. But now I need to focus on the actions I can take to get over it.

When the office jerk cuts you off in a meeting or steals your idea. What are you going to do? You can sit quietly in the meeting being moody and refuse to contribute and be seen as a non team player. Or you can beat the office jerk at their own game by improving on the idea (since you’ve thought through all the details) or better yet, raise all the issues that need to be worked through with the idea. Which is better for your career advancement? Be seen as a moody, non-cooperative person or someone who critically analyses an idea and comes up with ways to improve it. I guarantee you, being seen as the latter is the key to success.

CONCLUDING ACTION

So what actions can we take from Eckhart Tolle? Next time you encounter an unwanted and unplanned event, do the following:

• Let the negative emotions rise. That is normal. That is human.

• But once you’ve acknowledged your negative emotions, it’s time to stop it. Don’t wallow in self pity.

• Use Mel Robbins’ 5 Second Rule to get out of that state. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

• Activate your Vagus nerve breathing technique to lower your heart rate and adrenaline.

• Then accept that an event has occurred. Now let’s focus on the actions needed to move on.

I promise that the more often you do this, the less time you will need to wallow in self pity, and the sooner you take action to move on. Life is too short to wallow in events you can’t control. Get over them and continue to create the life you want.

Blog Photo by christian acosta on Unsplash