Dealing with Uncontrollables

What actions tend to rile you?

Child care gone awry
No-show guests
Appointment who arrives or stays late
Cat barf
Never-ending emails and voice mails
Bad attitudes
Line-breakers
Traffic
Uncommunicated expectations


I know you were expecting 10 items, so I stopped at nine – not to rile you, but to jar your expectations.

Much of what irritates us is unmet expectations. We all secretly want to live a fairy tale life, where people do the things we expect them to do. Reality check – Life Happens! While we are expecting our ideal outcome, a different outcome unfolds.

I am the eternal optimist! Life experience has taught me to be very flexible. You, too, need to actively engage in contingency planning. Flexibility is my #1 tip for dealing with uncontrollables.

When your primary child care is unavailable, no doubt, you have a contingency plan. That’s why I listed it first.

I deal weekly with no-show guests. As much as I’d like to believe that all who accept my gracious invitations will actually appear, life experience has taught me that regardless of my attempts to ensure those who say they will attend, a small % will not appear or ever give a reason for their absence. Since I’m a glass half-full person, I know that regardless of my frustration, I will be able to accommodate those whose plans changed at the last minute. The control freak in me would still love to be able to count on those who accept to actually arrive.

The best defense for a tardy or over-zealous guest is a great assistant. If you are not fortunate enough to have an assistant, plan ahead, and ask a coworker to notify you of your next appointment.

If anyone has a remedy for cat barf, I am all ears. My dear cats tend to have dyspepsia most often when I am most pressed to attend an early morning meeting. I need to practice my own advice – allot 10 extra minutes into your morning routine to account for cat barf, spilled milk, missing buttons and school permission slips.

Emails and voice mails are as prolific as blog authors. Allocate a defined amount of time to respond to each communication. Even unsolicited personal communications, except for unknown email addresses including only an attachment or obvious spam, generally deserve some response. We never know who will be friends, clients or referral sources.

I learned long ago that the only attitude that I can control is my own. I’m a glass (more) than half-full girl. This helps me deal with bad attitudes, line-breakers and bad traffic. We never know what issues another person is dealing with. A Methodist minister who delivered the baccalaureate address for my daughter’s high school graduation provided an anecdote that sticks with me. He described driving super slowly from his church to home in order not to spill overfull pans of lasagna. As a result of his story, when people do irritating things I try to imagine that their motives are admirable, rather than designed to make me crazy. After, all, people generally are focused on their own motivations. It is self-centered for us to think that other people are acting with us in mind.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! None of us are true mind-readers. Many of our disappointments occur when we have not voiced our expectations to others.