Stop making molehills into mountains

Some people take in information and magnify it. Someone presents a small problem to them and it turns into a major problem. Then they ruminate about this major problem and the need for a major solution.

But life is more about subtle problems than major ones. It is more about the years of overeating than the doctor's visit where we learn our BMI lists us obese. It is more about a student’s poor study habits than the failing grade on a test. It is about a lack of a budget, not the foreclosure.

This provides the shock and emotion. The years of overeating, overspending or refusal to study didn’t have such an emotional impact. The effects were more subtle.

When we follow this pattern, the next step is usually to commit to a major change. Since we have a big problem in front of us, we assume we need a big response to fix it.

But underneath the emotion there is a ton of useful information. This information tends to get ignored while we focus on the extremes.

Being the director of operations for a growing company I experience this from staff on a daily basis. It could be a customer complaint comes in. It could be a simple request from a customer to do something different from our normal process.

It could be a problem with one the vehicles we have on the road. It could be a key employee getting sick and calling off. It could be that two employees disagreed on something and now they can’t work in the same room without tension.

Whatever the situation, usually what happens is that the problem gets magnified. Someone takes the info and immediately jumps to the worst-case scenario. One small obstacle and they feel the company has to close and never reopen.

But this is ridiculous. If we stopped working after any small problem, we would never grow the business. We have to be able to address the problem. We have to find a fix the problem and a fix to the system that created the problem and then move on.

This is different from the recurrence of the same problem over and over again. In that scenario we have systematic flaws that need fixed. Until we fix the system issue, we will continue to have the same problems.

This is different. This is to take ANY problem that comes up and make it into the biggest problem ever.

In these scenarios, keeping your head is important. You have to see through the exaggerations. You have to get the facts. You have to understand what is happening. You have to understand the true level to which each element has progressed.

If you can do that, you can start to reduce the mountains back to the molehills that they are. You can determine that a small correction is all that is required to get back on track.

Now, how many of us do the same thing for our personal goals? How often do we stop and analyze the situation objectively? Or do we get all worked up and emotional after any problem?

Being a parent, I find the same structure plays out at home. If I’m not careful I can take my daughter’s refusal to get ready for bed and turn into a major problem. Instead of working through the problem (getting her to go to bed) I would then yell and scream and carry on about how terrible her behavior is.

When it comes to the systems and habits approach to improvement, we have to make sure we aren’t magnifiers. It is easy to overcome a small obstacle but impossible to overcome a mountain of adversity.

We have to learn to stop, breath, and assess the situation. We have to do this without our emotions driving our reactions. We have to learn to see the root of the problem. We can’t get caught up in the emotions of the moment. Then we have to form a plan to move forward.

Doing this might seem like it is setting you up for failure because you may believe that you need extreme motivation to make lasting change. But it is actually the opposite. When you try to change something for the long term, you have to reduce the motivation required.

You want to learn how to keep moving forward with the fix regardless of how you feel about the problem. If you don’t do this, you will find that your motivation to attack the problem wanes. This happens as you start to forget the feeling you had when you found out about the problem.

The systems and habits approach to improvement is less emotional and more strategic. It takes the problem and helps us to try and understand it systematically. Then it gives us steps to take to remedy the system.

Being a magnifier might seem like a great way to be on top of problems. But all this does is exaggerate the problem by adding more and more emotion. Instead, we have to learn to see the molehills as they actually are. Those molehills are not mountains of adversity. They are small system problems. Fix them and move on.