Life will throw you plenty of curveballs along the way including your property business. Sometimes you take them in your stride, sometimes they knock you down. There will be plenty of challenges in work that will make you want to scream at times. Especially when work or your business is a bit much, you want your home life to run smoothly. But also here there will be challenges at times, and there will be no accounting for what is happening in your professional life. It’s Murphy’s law at times with everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Those are the times when you want to crawl up in a little ball and hope tomorrow things will have automatically fixed themselves – from cooking equipment to the thing you messed up at work.
Alas, that won’t be the case, and you will have to deal with life yourself. But there are ways to arm yourself to all those surprises life can throw at you. Here are a few tips.
- When something happens, you will usually react quite emotionally towards the whole situation. And although you should let that happen, don’t get hijacked by that feeling. What you need to do is collect yourself as quick as possible and start dealing with the issue rather than the emotion. You begin by taking time to get used to the problem. Often we make poor choices when we are under stress. Figure out how long you have until something really becomes life disrupting. Can you make do for a while, can you find alternatives, or can you call in favours. All these might help buy you some extra time, which is essential to get yourself some headspace.
- Try to define the problem for yourself. Framing the question for yourself might help you to determine what’s really important and what’s not. Let’s say your cooker just gave up. Maybe you had the foresight to get some cooking equipment insurance, and the problem is really finding the time to get in touch with your insurer. Now your question is not so much having to call in emergency funds to replace the cooker but to deal with all the paperwork. Which obviously is not appealing, but less of a mountain to climb if you didn’t have insurance. Just spending time on looking at the problem might give you a whole new perspective. In the same example, when your cooker has stopped working, maybe you now have an opportunity to start on that kitchen remodel that you have always wanted to do. Sure, it won’t be as perspective shifting as that in reality, but if you see a challenge as an opportunity, great things can happen.
- The latter is really going against your instinct, which could help people. Of course, your instinct is to fix things, so they are just the way they were before. It’s human nature to want to do so. But what if you didn’t? What if you take whatever challenge has come your way and double down? Let’s say your TV has broken, maybe that’s an excellent opportunity to ditch the screen time and invest some time in reading or your other creative hobbies.
- That might be a bit too extreme for some (read: most) people. For those who want to tackle the problem more traditionally, it usually helps to divide the problem into smaller pieces. I.e. if say, for example, a pipe had burst at work, you can start tackling the problem in terms of urgency. First would be getting the leak stopped and the pipe fixed. Second would be dealing with all the water and making sure that the office and affected areas are dry again. This way you can spot for leaks later on. After the leaks and water have been dealt with, you will want to check for any lasting damage to the office and contents. If you find any damage, you will want to list these in terms of severity and effect on your home. If you approach a problem like this, you will find that you tackle the big things first and the problem will be solved quicker than trying to take it all in one go.
- Whatever you do, even confronted with a significant challenge, always try to look on the positive side of things. It’s not just that negative thinking is exhausting and, in general, not the most beautiful state of mind to be in, it is more about trying to look at things from a positive side. Thinking positive will give you more energy and see less ‘stuff’ as bad.
It enables the brain to find new pathways and help you deal with challenges in a creative way. And that’s what most problems need: creative problem-solving – even if it is just fixing your cooker.
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