Urgency — I’ve got to sort this out NOW!

‘I’ve got to get this sorted out NOW! (but I don’t know what to do…) is a cry I hear time and time again when I’m coaching people. There’s a situation they’re facing which is unresolved — and they’re feeling extremely uncomfortable about it — even pained.

It might be a business person wondering how to get their business back on track, or a woman wanting to sort out her relationship issues, parent wanting to help their anxious child.

Not surprisingly, it feels to them extremely urgent that this problem gets ‘fixed’ — because it seems as if only then can they relax and get rid of this awful stress, strain, anxiety and overwhelm that’s filling their head.

So, let’s take a step back. What is it that each of these people really wants? The details may be different, but what they ultimately want is to feel better. To be able NOT to feel stressed and anxious, to be content and calm and happy with life.

And in every case, they think they know how that’s going to happen.

By solving THIS problem, of course. The one that’s right here in front of them, taking up all their time and attention.

Ahh. Maybe that’s the clue. When something is taking all our time and attention, it seems very big and very important. We want to get it out of the way so we can deal with other stuff. The result is that we give it even more time and attention, and it seems even more of a problem and then it’s even more urgent to get rid of it but arghhh….it’s still here.

If you write ‘problem’ on a piece of paper and hold it up to your face, it’s hard to see anything else isn’t it? Try it. Mostly what you can see is paper — with maybe a little bit of the rest of the world visible around the edges. This is what we’re innocently doing when we give tricky things our full attention, and more than their fair share of time. But if I put the piece of paper down on my desk, it just becomes a piece of paper among the other bits and pieces that I have around me. Sometimes I’m looking at it, sometimes I put something on top of it, sometimes I look the other way. I may not deal with it today, but by tomorrow, I may have had a new idea about what to do with it, or decided I can bin it altogether.

This can happen with our real live problems. When we can’t fix them straight away, usually that’s because they’re not ready to be solved. It seems to me that, a bit like fruit on a tree, problems or decisions become ripe. Until they do, we have one heck of a struggle trying to get them sorted. And once they ARE ripe, it’s easy — almost effortless to know what to do.

When we don’t realise this, we go on and on, working ourselves up into more and more of a frenzy trying to find an answer which we don’t know. Sometimes we even make a decision even though it doesn’t feel right, just for the sake of making SOME kind of decision. Often these don’t work out very well!

What if that feeling of urgency is actually a signal telling you ‘You’re worked up about this. You’re not seeing it clearly. Step back. Slow down?’

When we are prepared to do this, to tolerate the discomfort of the unresolved urgency and give ourselves time and space, we open up the opportunity for new thinking, other alternatives, and for things to develop in a way that actually makes our decisions easy.

Let me give you a couple of examples — first a time when I tried to deal with an ‘unripe’ problem, and secondly, when I just waited, and the problem effortless sorted itself.

As many of you know, I used to be a teacher. But a few years ago, I started to feel that it was time to move on. I won’t bore you with the details, but I had just had enough of the whole thing — I wasn’t enjoying it like I had. There were good elements, but too many bad ones as well. The problem was, I just couldn’t make the decision to finally quit — I was training as a coach, but as yet had no clients or income from that direction, and I still had children at school and appreciated the income and the school holidays. In a session with my own coach, as I complained about my indecision, he asked me the question: ‘What makes you think you have to decide now?’

It sounds a simple enough question, but when I reflected on it I saw something really important: What made me think I needed to decide now was the constant barrage of questioning and arguing and pros and cons listing that was going on in my head, driving me crazy. If only I could get rid of THAT then life would already be a whole lot better. And the only way I could see to get rid of that was to make a decision. But I couldn’t, so I was stuck with it.

Or so I thought.

Because what I then realised was that there IS another way to get rid of the noisy barrage of thinking going on inside our heads at times like this. It’s to realise that if an answer isn’t forthcoming, it is much more helpful to stop asking the question and just get on with things for the time being. Which is what I did. I just continued teaching part time, enjoying some bits, and feeling frustrated with others. As I did so, I started to build up a couple of other businesses which took more of my time and attention. I became less and less interested and involved at school as my hours dwindled, and I started to hand responsibilities on to others with more enthusiasm. Then a year or two later, a new headteacher was appointed to join our school, and it seemed a natural time to leave. It was obvious, it was easy. It took hardly any thinking at all.

So here’s another example. This one, somehow I just knew instantly that this was a problem whose time had not yet come.

My daughter started off studying 4 A levels, as did everyone at her school, with a view to dropping one of them after a year. Even in the first term of 6th Form she became totally fed up with Biology. She didn’t get on with the teacher, and she struggled to stay motivated with the subject. We’d all assumed that Art would be the one that got dropped at the end of the year (and biology would be useful for her psychology degree), but she decided in November that there was no way she was going to spend 2 whole years studying biology. She ranted at me one evening: ‘There’s no way I’m doing biology next year, AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!’ At the time I hadn’t even thought about whether I wanted to try and make her or not but Biology definitely looked a better option to me. However, what I could see, plain as day, was that there was absolutely no mileage in trying to deal with this now. I just said, ‘Oh, I see’, she looked pretty surprised, and that was that.

By the time the end of the year came round, Art had become such an onerous subject, with coursework taking every spare minute of the evening and weekend, that she couldn’t wait to drop it. Biology had settled down. For my daughter the decision was a no-brainer. I was so glad I’d said nothing to muddy the water!

A businessman I’m working with feels he urgently needs to make some key decisions about what to do with his struggling business. What he can’t see, but is very clear to me, is that his stress and fragmented thinking around which of the 12 options to go for and that making a decision is urgent, is the one thing that is really getting in the way of his seeing what actually makes most sense.

Urgency feels — well very urgent! It seems as if it’s telling us that we need to act — NOW! But what I’ve come to see clearly is that what it’s actually telling us is pretty much the opposite. Pause…You’re worked up…you’re not going to make a great decision right now.

We can be free of the noise in our head WITHOUT solving the problem — simply by realising that we don’t HAVE to solve the problem. A better solution will almost certainly come to us from a calmer state of mind, and so the urgent feeling becomes a signal — look for a calmer state of mind. Wait for that. Then you’ll see an answer.

It’s kind of obvious when you think about it that we don’t do well when we’re worked up. We certainly can see it in other people! But urgency drives us sometimes to discount common sense. Once you see this, though, I wonder if you’ll take a different approach next time you’re overcome by a feeling of urgency…