Problem - No Problem

I have two daughters who always confirm Darwin’s theory of Evolution of Species by confirming our forefathers.  It was a Sunday and I was lying in the bed reading a book and my wife was doing some household activity. Both my daughters were missing in action. Suddenly we hear a loud noise, a big noise of a wooden stool falling down and a couple of vessels rolling. Both myself and my wife rush to the kitchen from where the sound originated with my wife shouting loudly “which monkey is that? “

My God, what I saw there? I saw my mother standing there with flour on all her body and a couple of vessels around. Suddenly my younger daughter appears there and yelled “Grandmother is that monkey”. Hopefully you all should know the very cordial relationship Indian daughter in law shares with her mother in law. All the trainings I have attended on situation handling, conflict management, and human relationship flashed on my mind. Nothing seems to work out. I did the one which I am capable of doing, just went out of the house, started my bike, ran and simply disappear into thin air.

Dear toastmasters, we all are facing many such problems in our daily life. Isn’t it?  Now I am going to tell you how to handle all this problems. But please keep it very secret, because not many common people are capable of handling these kinds of such complex issues.

Ok, now we have find out that there is a problem, what can we do? Just look around, if no one other than you have noticed it then just leave the problem. Why to get into a problem by spotting one.  Let someone else has the pleasure of handling it.

The second scenario is when one another person also noticed the problem, what can we do now? Many times he should also be confused without understanding what has happened actually.  Check whether we can push the blame on his head let him handle it. Or with his help try to push it to a third person and leave the place.

Many times in our official job, we need to handle a lot of problems, and then what can we do? Look at the problem deeply. Empower you subordinates that mean we are molding them for higher responsibility. They also need to learn how to handle complex situations. We are actually training them.

We can also make people in our same cadre to handle the problem. That means that we are delegating the jobs and help them achieving the goals. We need to be team workers, you see.

In the most unfortunate condition of we ended up having to deal with the problem, keep our boss in the loop and ask for his advice and suggestion. But we need to ensure that we keep the next level of superiors also in the loop. This is to ensure that we need to take the credit and if things go wrong our boss should be in the firing line and not us.

We need to understand that problems do not solve by themselves, only people get accustomed to it. After sometime this problem becomes a reality and there is no need for us to do anything on that. Just leave the problem, it will diffuse by itself.

But ensure that you are very active in the office. When you walk inside the office, walk very fast as if the entire office had been in fire. Or just keep looking the floor or the ceiling, with a grim face, let people think that you are very serious. 

When someone ask for your ask for some opinion or suggestion or information, it may be a very simple information like what is two added to two, do not answer immediately. Keep thinking for a long time, write something in your notebook or open up your computer and search, you may even hang on the face book, and then answer him after one hour. Let people think you are very serious when handling situations.

Always keep lot of papers and files in your desk.  The more papers in your table show that you go deep into many things. If your office is a new age hi-tech paperless office, then keep a lot of books, preferably big big books on different subjects like The Republic by Pluto, complete works of Tennyson, some book on management and something on your companies activities. Let people think that you always refer a lot of information. Then they will not trouble you with the problems.  You know, we need to like our work, it should fascinate us, we should love to sit and look at it for hours.

Look at all religious books, all say that God is most benevolent and most merciful. He is full of love and affection; He does not want us to get into troubles. Then why should face and handle problems, we are not created for that.  We have to be God fearing and should not go against His wishes.

Even all government declares as welfare state and wants to ensure that all their citizens should have a peace and comfort life. We need to be loyal to our countries and should not act against the rule of the land.

Thirdly, if we continue to handle lot of problems our health will get spoiled. What for we are working here – in the middle of a desert? Just to make money, what is the purpose in killing ourselves with high blood pressure and heart attack? No use. Remember don’t take life too seriously, you won’t get out alive.

Even doing a project in toastmasters is a big problem, a lot of preparation, coordinating with the mentor, repeated rehearsal and a tense performance. How to handle it? Then we need to do a mind tuning exercise. For seven minutes, we need to understand it is only the listener’s problem and not ours.

So friends, you have a problem, no problem – now I hope you all will follow this time tested principles, tested more than 35 years by me and believe it works.

Problem ……………………never ……………………………….. No problem