What do you do when you find a task or item daunting? Do you fold and give up? Or do you press on and persevere?
I have found it very helpful to sit down and talk with my friends. We get together for lunch or coffee and talk through life’s challenges. Relationships and finances seem to be the items we talk about the most. Challenges with our spouses, kids, budgets, college tuition are all common. The one position that we all have in common is to keep on keeping on. I gravitate to “embrace the suck”. The situation we find ourselves in may suck and there may not be much you can do about that, but we can learn to embrace it and persevere.
Right now, my son is deciding what to do after graduation. He was denied a grad position due to the federal research grant budget cuts. So now it’s time to decide what to do. It sucks, but his mindset is that he is going to find a position either in grad school or the workforce. His head is up and he’s doing the work necessary to have a position come autumn.
Another thing I find helpful is accepting the reality. I don’t understand people who laugh and smile through a hardship. We don’t have to be rotten or mean when something sucks, but I find it helpful to say a situation sucks. It’s accepting the reality. Then we get into our mindset of achieving, persevering, and growth. Then I can laugh at it or with it. Then I can smile. Because I’ve accepted my reality.
Apparently I’ve been snoring A LOT lately. That means Suzy isn’t sleeping well. She handled it by sleeping in another room. It honestly sucked not having my wife next to me but I get it. But the realities are that I snore and she slept in another room. We talked through it, laughed a little, and made some changes. We’ve been praying for healing and rest and that my snoring will stop. I changed my sleeping position and it all sems to have helped. The past week has been much better, my snoring has improved, and we’re both sleeping better.
Finally, getting to work is a key factor to growth and moving on. Identifying the key steps and just doing them. Our front screen door catches on the awning and has scraped a hole in the soffit fascia. I cut the fascia and had to chisel out the 2×4 frame board, then reset a new piece of fascia. It sucked because it was all overhead. But it was either that or continue listening to the scraping sound every time we opened the door. It got done.
So there are three of my ways of handling tasks I don’t like or find challenging. I hope this helps you with your next challenge in life.
Leave a Reply