Frustration can lead to helplessness when you are suddenly put on the spot.
Have you felt like everything is ready to cave in on you? You are suddenly put into a situation that you know very little about and the harder you try to make sense of it the worse it becomes.
Suddenly your mind starts to freeze up and all of the practical knowledge you have is useless.
Early this week I was faced with such a situation. There is frantic work taking place behind the scenes at Healthy Lifestyles Living. One of the many jobs that we are working on is to build our Healthy Lifestyles Shops. I am currently building my cricket shop because I am passionate about cricket. I have waited a long time to be able to actually start putting cricket items into my shop. Last Tuesday was my first attempt at doing this.
You may be thinking how hard can it be to put products into a shop? Well there is quite a learning curve to embark on before you even begin to know what to do. It requires you to select an appropriate picture and then scale it to three different sizes using a drawing program. This is the difficult part because the pictures available are not the right size to begin with. After completing that you need to be able to write a catchy description for each product and present in a way that will attract customers.
Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg because the real work and designing of the shop is left to our dedicated technician Neil Haywood. He makes it look easy and just smiles at us as we struggle with coding and all of the technical jargon of setting up blogs and ecommerce shops.
Larry Lewis was teaching me how to set up my shop. Generally Larry is a very patient chap but I could sense his frustration at how long it was taking me to get this new information. Sensing his frustration even made me more frustrated. To cut a long story short I remember working myself up into a state of helplessness. Here I was after waiting for so long to get my shop up and running and now I felt like I just couldn’t understand what to do.
My whole mindset went into a negative spin. I contemplated quitting and giving up right then and there. I didn’t need this frustration and this feeling like I was back at school not understanding what the teacher was saying.
Eventually with some expert guidance on Mr Lewis’s part I was able to get my pictures sorted and into the right categories for the shop. I felt somewhat better yet I came away from the episode in a negative frame of mind. All of the positive thinking and reading about how to focus your energy onto living in the now completely deserted me. It was like my mind went into automatic melt down mode.
As I reflected upon the situation I was unclear as if I wanted to do the hard work of placing the numerous items into my cricket shop. Negativity had a very strong hold on me and I could have easily succumbed to it. I am not a quitter but the thought did cross my mind. It was a struggle to sleep and to be upbeat about the exciting times that lay ahead for all of us at Healthy Lifestyles Living. Yes it is a massive work load but it is also about doing what you love. This negates the amount of time and commitment to get the job done.
The amazing part is that for us to really grow we need to step out of our comfort zone and learn new things. This is a big part of the process.
It is now easy to think back with hindsight of why things happen and that you should be more accepting of learning new things rather than just shutting down.
It is a stark reminder for me that no matter how much personal development you do there will always be challenging situations to test your response and where you actually are in relation to the challenges life throws at you.
It took me along time to get back onto the computer and see if I could remember how to resize the pictures and place the items into the shop. My first attempt failed and this created an uneasy feeling within me, however I knew I had to try again. The second time around I was successful and this made a huge difference to my thoughts.
I could see the products in my shop and the realization that finally I would have my own online cricket shop sunk in. The negativity began to fade away and it was replaced with enthusiasm and a desire to see how many products I could put into the shop. It was not all smooth sailing but I did feel good about putting five cricket bats into the shop.
Never ever give up and don’t stop three feet from gold continue to play a strong loud sound in my head. I am now buoyed that I didn’t succumb to the desire to quit.
The steps I took to bounce back are worth writing about.
The main one being that I just needed time to let the new information sink in. I needed to walk away and approach the whole process with fresh eyes.
I also had to remind myself of my goal and my why to succeed. I had to see what it was that I was actually contemplating giving up. This made me realize that this annoying frustration and learning curve was just another hurdle placed in front of me to test my resolve to succeed.
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