The Cost Of Forcing Solutions

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Chapters

• 0:00 Mirror Moments And Problem Habits
• 2:06 The Fuming Client And A Cancelled Slot
• 5:15 Persistence Without Progress
• 6:55 Leaving Platforms And Building Foundations
• 8:25 WordPress Woes And Support Lines
• 11:10 Time Pressure And Rising Frustration
• 13:10 Self-Reflection On Control And Health
• 16:27 Questions To Reframe Control
• 19:10 Workarounds Over Force
• 22:08 Culture, Reactions, And Requests
• 24:40 Replaying The Story To Learn
• 26:43 Act Without Burning Yourself Out

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hi there and welcome back to Empowerment Diaries. This is Lita, Goddess of Growth. I am your host. Today I want to talk about something we all face, but really do we stop to truly see? What we're talking about this evening is connected to an experience that I've had only this week, ended finally today. We're looking at the way we deal with problems and how that very process in dealing with and attempting to resolve problems can sometimes become the central part of our downfall, mentally, emotionally, physically. We, including myself, don't often acknowledge our own behavior in the heat of a moment. But life, as we know, has a clever way of holding up a mirror, showing us what we do through our interaction with others. So let me give you an example from my own week. I ended my work day today with a client who was, quite frankly, fuming. Without breaking confidentiality, here's what's happened. An appointment they had was cancelled with a day's notice. Now, a day's notice is in most circumstances more than enough time and a sign of respect, is it not? Especially when things happen that we cannot control, like ill health as an example. However, the client of course was not happy. In fact they were very unhappy because they'd had to rearrange their diary to accommodate the original slot for the appointment. So what happened next was a lesson in persistence. The client decided to spend hours, literally hours on the phone, using their sheer will and might and ability to stay on the line to try and force a solution to fit their original desire of having the appointment, if not at the same time, on the same day as originally arranged. I happened to be the last person to take the call from this client this evening. The last call for my day. And anyway, despite all their efforts and time invested, the progress that they thought they had made in getting a replacement appointment, they were on the line to me to explain after so many hours the last bit of hope that they had that they would be able to get another appointment in place disappeared. No alternative appointment could be found. The magic that they were trying to create with all their effort, it just didn't happen. No appointment materialized. The call ended not before they confirmed that they would be connecting with the CEO and going on social media to share their terrible service and experience. And at the heart of their complaint, other than the disappointment that the appointment was cancelled, was the amount of hours spent on the phone trying to correct an injustice, the injustice being the appointment being cancelled, and connecting with others that weren't in a position to override circumstances. The impression the client had was that they were speaking to people that really didn't care or could do nothing. So, as for my own experience, I have been spending quite a lot of time building my empire online, setting up foundation. For those of you that have been listening to the podcast from August of this year, I had to pivot. I took my creator network away from a social media platform, and I continue to build upon it so that I have a strong foundation. And part of that work has meant creating a presence online that is not reliant on social media. Of course, we are in the digital age. Social media is really important in terms of us being in a position to connect with others. I am looking into legacy building, I am looking into building real connections that's not driven by an algorithm. And it's interesting since I left the platform officially in August, as in left the contract that I was in, partnership, should we say, I don't believe I've actually heard from any of my frequent contacts that I had made on the platform. So life has shifted. And for the last few weeks, I've been learning a lot about not just website building. I moved from a website builder to WordPress, which is what I'm doing now, and it's really something that I work on daily. I have been deep in the weeds, as they say, of website building. I am so close, I think, to the harvest, should we say? I think yeah, I describe this part of the process as the spring, but I can actually see everything sp you know budding. I'm in different places, there's something to land on, but it's not ready as yeah. And a couple three days ago I came across what I thought was a bug in the system. Things were not working as they should work. So I called my service provider. The first day the lines kept cutting. I would hold for 15 minutes and under 15th minute silence. Three times I called, same situation. By the fourth time, I got through only to be told there was a level five hurricane ongoing. The staff were working regardless, but there was a few outages. I persisted beyond three calls. The line cut, just as I was describing what was going on with the website. I did wake in the morning to find I had had a missed call, but that evening, let's just say I was not too impressed. I decided to call the day after to follow up, and the lines answered so much uh more speedily. I was able to go through the technical issues that I was experiencing, and it was taking a few hours. It was decided to that the person I was speaking to would take it away to look at it. And then I started attempting to work on the website, and I was getting all these delays. It wasn't allowing me to move from page to page. I mean, literally, so many times throughout the time, I thought, I'm just going to leave this. I I can't, but I persevered, persevered. I mean, most of my nights these days, I am up till 12, 1 o'clock, really trying to build this foundation of mine so that I can get into the flow of podcasting and returning to live stream. But the work, the foundation building, that's my focus right now, and that's what needs to be done. Eventually, I had two different people troubleshooting two different issues, and hours slipped away whilst I was waiting. I wasn't sitting down twiddling my thumbs. I was actually attempting to continue work on the website and also trying to work out payment, um, membership. There's loads of things that I was going through admin-wise. I was very frustrated. I was hoping for a quick fix because time is limited. As anyone knows, when you have multiple jobs, your business, commitments, there's not enough time in the day. So when I have a time to commit to do my admin, get my business up and running, that is my time. Once it goes, I feel as if there is a delay for sure. So I am also at the almost the end of this project and process, and my aspiration is to be ready to do some form of first soft launch around December 2025. So I need to do real business admin to be ready for that soft launch so that I can feel comfortable when I live stream and serve that I have a base for people to return to. Instead, I felt my internal temperature rising, and with every hour that passed, it's amazing how long you can be on the phone to a department, a person when you're wanting something to be fixed. But hearing my client today, I saw it clearly. I was actually looking at my own reflection, my own frustration of the week. When I saw my client, the despair, I could just see myself how I was this week. I would say I was calm, I was not impressed for sure. I saw how easily in the call this evening we can give ourselves stress, high blood pressure. I mean, fortunately, today I don't have high blood pressure. I'm not sure why, nor that I'm asking for it. Quite a calm personality most of the time. But I can imagine, and I do imagine, that we give ourselves ailments because we are so committed to doing our best to steer things and trying to force resolutions. And it's not just in those moments where things don't go to plan, but the unexpected. We believe often that we do have the power and the control to shift most everything to our will, right? Trying to force resolutions in the situation where actually some of the things that need to happen take time. There's nothing that we can say or do that will override the time that it might need for someone to investigate what it is that we're reporting, or to rearrange an appointment to make sure that someone is available to attend that appointment. So I have a question for you this week, my listeners. What have you tried to move, fix, or resolve that's still there with you today? Are you able to look around you to identify those things that you try to mold to your will, manipulate, force, control, however you do it, to change the reality as it is? What is it that you have in your presence that you may now realize that actually no matter what you've tried to do, there was no changing it? What is it that you've actually committed your energy to and you have experienced a change? And when you're looking at the fact that you've experienced a change, what is it in that experience do you think you did that you would need to do again in order to get the same result? Because that's another thing. Sometimes I am privileged to be behind the scene, and I will speak to a client that believes they have the power to change a decision that has already been made. Some will speak and it's just a question, can this be changed? Others will come very flustered, high blood pressure, this has to be changed. The decision often has already been decided even before the query or the question or the request has been made. And it reminds me of, I suppose, our wider life. There are things that's going on in our life, even before we ask, the decision has been made. Mind you, it doesn't mean don't ask, but understand a number of the things that we are stressing about and worrying about. The decision has already been made. There's nothing that we can do to change that decision. But sometimes we do need to step up and ask the question because that's where the real change is being made. So in my case, the computer issue, my website issue, yeah, it's been resolved. Not by force. Actually, what happened? I was given two workarounds. One was to stop doing a thing, and one was more of a military action to remove the software and do something else. Well, I chose a balance of the two. I reinstalled the software and chose not to do the thing that was causing the bug or an issue. At least I know now what was causing the website to stall, which is knowledge is power, right? Not by force, a workaround. Conflicts can be removed when we're prepared to step back and breathe and allow sometimes things to just move on, move forward. Not everything. There are some things that we'll need to jam the brakes on for sure. But I definitely know I have learned something valuable. I learned how to navigate the website, how to build it and not to stress too much when things do go wrong, because they will go wrong, right? Things are always changing. And I've learned a bit more about how to build my website. So if there are problems in the future, I know now how to troubleshoot them. And I suppose this is the foundation that I'm going through, this building of my business, actually going through the nitty-gritty without funds. Because when I if I had funds, I probably would be paying someone to just get the website done. So I'm doing it all on my own and learning what the pitfalls are, what the opportunities are. And yeah, it's an interesting experience. And I'm actually very proud of the work I have done so far on the website, challenges and all. So as I say, I am in the part of spring as I see it with this website. And soft launch, I am getting ready to launch in December. We're not um going to get fixated on time and season because, as I've said before, evidently it isn't my task to try and bend the wheel of what is going on. Um, it is the case of, I suppose, asking questions, but really not trying to force a resolution. Mind you, what I can tell you, every hiccup I have had with building my website, my business, the crashes and the downtime have been followed with things and resolutions that were far better than the path that I was on. The websites and so that I have now is far superior than what I've had over the years. Superior. So I am learning very slowly at 50 that is as they say traditionally they always say in our culture, every disappointment covers a blessing, right? When you're in the midst of it and you've taken time out to do the work and you may have lost your work, or as uh the client said, rearrange their diary to make the appointment. When you've done all of that, it can sometimes be difficult to remember. Hold on a minute. No doesn't mean denied, right? So it's not about fixing it, it's about being ready to adapt to what changes coming forward. And there is so much in this life, isn't there, that makes us feel as if we do not have control. And I think when things build a momentum, we tend to think we're steering it, not realizing that yes, we are creators. Our task is to mix and blend and put out our projection, spend time meditating, we need to actually spend time tapping in to actually work out what it is that we're wanting to create. But our will alone is not enough to bring our creations into reality, is it? Let's be honest and fair now. We are beings that often think we are in control, and then when we might when life reminds us that we are not in control, high blood pressure and ailments happen. And the truth is the only thing we truly have control over mostly is our reaction. And I say mostly is our reaction, because often our reactions are ingrained in behaviors that we've learned from a very young age, often behaviors that we spend little time to question. And it is a case of questioning. The more we question, the more we understand actually, is that behavior or reaction to that scenario the best reaction and behavior to that scenario? Listen, are you listening or are you reacting? And culturally, we are all taught to react in different ways. When you speak to clients daily, there is a pattern of behavior that each culture has when dealing with conflict or situations that require a resolution. When you get to understand the nuances, you can almost preempt how the person's going to react, what they're going to ask for. And all it is is like a dance because we all know we aren't in control. We're all creating this moment each and every time as we connect and disconnect from each other. We don't know what's going to be created at the end of it. When you call a service and you decide that you're going to ask for a discount, understand that service has already factored in your request. Your only task is to decide what energy you're going to bring to your request. Now, do you want to raise your blood pressure whilst you put forward your request? Oh, I need to have a discount because of da-da-da-da-da. Oh, hi there, I'm calling because I want to have a discount. I'm just seeing what you can do for me today. The company, they've already factored in your request. All you have to decide is how you show up. And how you show up, it might determine your mood for the rest of the day. It might determine the conversations that you're going to have with others for the rest of your day, your week, and however long. Control. And that's what it comes to, really, doesn't it? Our time goes in a way that we hadn't planned. And if we're not in the right frame of mind, we can get upset and resentful. And often when we have that feeling of resentment and anger and frustration, often the child in us comes out wanting to blame something or someone for our disappointment, our loss of time, not achieving the goals that we'd set out for ourselves. Oh, so here is a practice I am taking forward. It's something that I've been practicing for years, but I definitely had a reminder today. Taking time to replay our story. And it's just a small story like what happened today with the client, which helped me remember my whole attitude for this week, getting frustrated and not being able to proceed and um succeed with my website because I had so many ideas of how it will come together and so. My website, in my opinion, looks amazing. I've been doing the work. And it's like Spirit has been guiding me through blockages to get my website up in the right way. I hope the client has an appointment eventually that they are happy with, if that is for them. But what I understand in playing my story, I need to, I'd love to, I want to keep addressing the stories I tell to myself, keep looking at my beliefs. It is a process, and always question what I could have done better with the knowledge I have now. If you know that ultimately in the end it's going to be okay, how would you behave in this moment right now? Now I'm not suggesting by any way, shape, or form that when everything happens, one should be passive. Sometimes we need to get into that feeling, sometimes it's that very feeling that's going to get us to move and do something more and tap into that. But also, what we need to be aware of is taking it too personal that it affects our health, and you take it over the edge. Yeah. Because we only know when we know, right? Thank you for listening. Do tap into the podcast. Until next time, stay empowered. This is Vita, goddess of growth.