Tag: Fixing Problems

Become A Problem Solver

Happiness, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I heard an interesting turn of phrase recently. Someone I was listening to online said ‘When we think of Mother Nature we could think that we have a responsibility to mother nature.’ This got me thinking about our role in the interconnected web of life and our responsibilities as co-creators of life on Earth.

We are both parent and child, so to speak. Our individual existence is both of these things and there is some responsibility in both them. This got me thinking about the ownership we choose or don’t choose to take in our lives; whether we choose to make things better or not.

Whether we like it or not, we are stewards of this world, we are taking care of the world that belongs to our grandchildren, as the saying goes. When life is seen through this point of view, we become solution focused, we become problem solvers.

Sometimes, Just Pay It

Happiness, Health

A few months ago I went to the dentist as a tooth was bothering me a little, but not too much. They found an infection in the root of the tooth and I was told that removing the tooth would be the best course of action. The cost was £65.

I decided to leave it as it was, because it wasn’t really bothering me. Towards the end of last year I suddenly had nausea and pain in my stomach. It lasted most of the day until I vomited around 9pm.

The pain in my stomach was so severe I ended up at Accident & Emergency (UK) at around 10pm. There was a 10 hour wait to be seen. By this time I had figured out it was the infection in my tooth that had leaked out and gone into my stomach.

I left the A&E and went home. I got the earliest appointment and paid the £65 to have my tooth removed. The point of the story, as with many situations in life, sometimes you should just pay the money and avoid what may happen further down the way.

This applies to fixing problems when they are small, not when the have been left to become bigger. The action does not have to be paying money, it is whatever fixes the problem, as soon as it arises.

Not My Job

Happiness, Success

Organisation fall or stumble when individuals regularly say “It’s not my job to do that,” and then pass the buck onto someone else or some other department. Organisations thrive when each member of staff has autonomy to make decisions and take ownership of issues. The attitude becomes “that needs doing,” so they do it.

In life seeing things that need doing and getting on with doing them will mean you become a problem solver and a more productive person. Life becomes easier if your focus is on fixing things rather than avoiding things that need to be fixed, because issues are fixed before they become too big to handle. Life also becomes more fulfilling.

So, become a problem solver.

Building Trust

Happiness, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, and often it does. The difficulty comes when technology promises to make your life easier and then it does not deliver. This is kills trust.

I have a pre-payment electicity meter, which is a Smart Meter that is not so smart. I can top it up easily enough on the company’s website using my debit card and the promise is that it will reflect on my Smart Meter in my home within 60 minutes. It never does.

When you search for guidance on how to top up the meter manually, you find a video on the company’s website where a man gives instructions on how to manually top up the meter by entering a twenty digit number, one digit at a time.

Each number requires you to press the button repeatedly; eight times for a number seven and once for a zero, twenty times. The man even suggests, in his mannerisms and words, that this is a common problem.

The point I am making is not to have a moan about this poor service. My point is that the company appears to find it easier, and possibly cheaper, to make a video explaining how to manually top up the meter rather than fixing the problem to allow the meters to top up automatically once they are topped up online. This may benefit the company in the short term but trust is lost with their customers, which may be more costly in the long term.

This is a business relationship between a business and a customer, but the same can be said for personal relationships. A quick fix in the short term will not build a strong relationship. For example, you cannot buy trust, you must trust others and act in ways that allow others to trust you, this takes time and consistency.

As another example, if you said that you gave £10 to a homeless person this morning you might get a vague well done. If you said that you gave up your weekend to help paint a community centre then this will be much more respected. The point is that time spent helping others has more meaning and value than money spent, which is quickly done.

The very definition of money is that you are giving an IOU for someone else to provide goods and service in the future, it states this clearly on all bank notes. In effect you are passing the buck.

The fact that it takes time and energy to build trust is true in all human relationships.