I woke up this morning and in the few minutes while I lingered in bed, snug inside the warmth of my little comforter cocoon, my monkey-mind started dancing. My first two thoughts were stress inducing thoughts. The first was related to my nephew, who is destined to return to South Dakota in about a week. His stay in California has been enjoyable, but problematic for him.
I believe that we shape our lives with our choices over time – both the choices to do things and the choices to not do things. He made his choices and they left him in a place where, at the end of the day, he was dependent on other people for housing, being chronically under-employed. He made enough of an income to keep the wolf from the door, but not enough to actually build a door.
So, under that circumstances, sooner or later you snooze the wolf comes charging in. My stress arises from the fact that I have an internal debate on what I should do – my nature and instinct is to lend a helping hand, but, when you help people hold the wolf off – they never learn to do it themselves. Even then, it is not so much that they don’t learn how to do it themselves, but rather than they don’t see the need to do it themselves.
The wolf never gets them because someone else is always there to hold the wolf off. I think that sometimes in life you need to get bitten by the wolf so that you understand that the wolf is very real and that you have an obligation to make the right choices, the choices that keep the wolves of this life at bay.
I am, by instinct and inclination, a protector. I will often hurl myself into battles that other people should be fighting, simply because it is on my nature. So, making a tactical decision to not engage, in anticipation of a strategic good, is very stressful for me. In the case of my nephew I made the decision not to engage tactically in the hopes that strategically he will learn how to engage. But, it’s always tough to stand by that decision when the wolves are rushing in.
My second stressor this morning was thinking about work. One portion of my portfolio is to provide application support to a suite of applications used by a wide variety of customers. The challenge arises because, though I can support and influence the application, I cannot support and influence the environment the application works within (the desktop/laptop configurations). Consequently, customers sometimes land on me where I literally cannot do anything to help them and the group that should be helping them isn’t (can’t or won’t, either information of implication).
This leaves the customer in a tough spot – often caught in a vicious loop where they can’t get any help. Because of that nature I mentioned above, I am inclined to help these people – in this case, they are trying to fend off the wolf (in this case a faulty desktop) but the bureaucracy and anonymity of a large organization are preventing them.
They are doing the right thing – asking for help, reporting bugs and problems – but the group that is supposed to help them – isn’t. It’s a struggle for me because I have minimal influence with the other group – I can, through force of will, sometimes manage to hammer them hard enough to take the extra steps of actually helping the customer, but it is emotionally and resource intense – the cost paid is fairly high.
So in both of these stressful cases I am holding a bag full of stressors that I really shouldn’t be holding. In both cases it is literally someone else’s bag full of stress, and I just can’t figure out how to let go of it. (I have a scheduled meeting later this day with my manager, as I feel the need to seek their authorization to tell some of these customers – “I’m sorry, I simply can’t help you, you need to go hammer desktop support”. I hate doing that, but emotionally, in terms of managing the stress – I need some way out from under that particular bag of stress.
As far as the nephew is concerned, I just keep reminding myself that he is an adult, capable of making his own decisions and responsible for the consequences of those decisions. Easy to say but tough to do when the wolves are surging through the door.
No comments:
Post a Comment