Every day you encounter uncomfortable situations that that you wish you could just escape from, but do you know that how do you deal with those fish-out-of-water moments affect your success.
These are some points from a letter a father wrote to his daughter who was moving away to study in 1914 on how to deal with awkward situations:
Don’t shirk from new experiences and custom. Take the cold bath bravely. Enjoy what is and not pine for what is not. Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself. Make yourself do unpleasant things, so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. Above all remember: your father loves you and believes in you and expects you to be a wonderful woman.
~Sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois
How do you handle uneasy situations? Do you turn them into something positive or do you let them get you down?
These are 12 uncomfortable situations that you can turn into assets. I put my with my insights below the point. The info is based on the full length article at Hubspot.
1] Learning to take a compliment
Learning to accept a compliment gracefully is an acquired skill and often has less to do with you rather than allowing the other person to express to you that your action or behavior has impacted them. Don’t deny them that moment.
2] Public speaking
How do you get over the discomfort? Remember that the audience came to hear you and is friendly. Talk to them like you would to a group of your friends.
3] Working with data
If you find math a difficult subject an easy way to get started is to learn to recognize trends. See what happens when you change only one variable in all the date and what effect that has. The more time you spend with the data the more natural interpreting it will become.
4] Waking up early
Are you a morning person or a night owl? Each person has their own rhythm and if getting up early does not work for you, it is not the end of the world. Play around with different settings and then settle for that one that works for you.
Learn more about the morning person and night owl in this post.
5] Taking critical feedback
Depending on your childhood experience with criticism you will respond differently to this experience. In the business world most of the time criticism is meant to help you not to destroy you. It is meant to help you become better at your job. Getting defensive or not listening is a natural self-defence mechanism, but is not in your best interest.
6] Giving critical feedback
Whenever you have to give critical feedback, remember it is never about the person, but about the action they took that your are critical about. This tells the other person that you want to help them and not destroy them.
7] Fighting through conflict
Conflict arises when two parties believe that they are right and you end up with a lose lose situation. Finding the root cause of the conflict through questions and patient listening easily turns the situation into a win win situation and helps both sides understand the other’s viewpoint.
8] Exercising
To improve your success you have to involve body, mind and spirit. Exercising is the body part. There are a number of simple ways to exercise that won’t feel like exercise.
Always take the stairs instead of the elevator
Park far away from the front door
Go for a walk over lunch
9] Unplugging
If you use your smart phone for work, just check it after you come home and then before you go to bed. I have recently read that many successful people go part or the whole weekend without it. It will be quite to break the habit of looking at constantly looking at the phone, but practice makes perfect. It takes about 21-30 days to change a habit. At the same time you will realize a reduction in your stress level.
10] Networking and making small talk
Do you listen to reply or do you truly listen when you are out networking? You will establish a much faster rapport with the other person if you just listen.
What do you do when your discover that you made a mistake? You know when it happened because of that sinking feeling in your stomach. From past experience I know that facing up to it is the best way to deal with it. Trying to deny it often gets you into deeper trouble, whereas admitting it lets you come across as congruent.
12] Getting in over your head
I have a tendency to just jump in and then realize that it would be so much easier if I had learned “to swim first”. To deal with situations like this, take a step back and re-evaluate. Break your task down into individual tasks that you know how to do and study the parts or ask for help with the parts that give you trouble. Just do it, you can grumble under your breath, but you will be so much more relieved once you have figured it out and successfully accomplished it.
→ This post was adapted from this Hubspot article.
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How do you handle uneasy situations? Do you turn them into something positive or do you let them get you down?
