Inside The Edge
About
My
Four Cents
Jamie O’Neill’s “My Four Cents” articles offer a great change of pace from the typical literature you may find on a management consultant or leadership development web site. Most of the time, self-improvement is about assessing and amending your personal skills; however, every once in a while it is necessary to take a step back from it all and consider broader topics like your personal values and goals. “My Four Cents” forces you to do exactly that.
With her down-to-earth and practical perspectives, Jamie offers a view of the world that everyone can derive some value from. The articles in this section allow you to remove yourself from day to day trails and focus on what you consider to be truly important in your life. So take the time to read a few; we think they will really help… but hey, that’s just our four cents.
| Tolerations Be Gone! |
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Question: What does a crammed inbox, messy office, and unsupportive friends have in common? Answer: They are things we put up with and seldom ever do anything about. They are things that we tolerate. Toleration is the practice of deliberately allowing or permitting a thing of which we disapprove of, to exist. In other words, they are the things in our life that we can’t stand, we could do something about it, but we choose to complain and be lazy and do nothing. To be fair, many of the things we tolerate we don’t even consider it an issue because we have become so accustomed to it that it just feels normal. Let me give you an example. A few years ago I was sitting down trying to come up with a New Year’s Resolution that I felt could make a huge difference in my life. The resolution I came up with was to stop tolerating crappy people in my life. I had a friend that would talk behind my back and although she never verbalized it, hated the fact that I was happy in my career and my life. Whenever this “friend” was around, she made “funny” comments to me, little digs, and for some reason, I tolerated it. Something had to change, I wasn’t happy when she was around. So, to honour my New Year’s Resolution, I “broke up” with this friend. When we are born into this world, we didn’t tolerate anything and when something was going on that didn’t meet our needs, we let the world know it. Believe me, I have 2 toddlers at home, they make it perfectly clear to me what they will and will not tolerate. At some point in our life though we transition into this begrudging and overly tolerant person that we constantly need to scold, yet still, do nothing about. When we tolerate things, they eat us up inside. I believe tolerations fall into a few key buckets: people, work, health, and home. People – I am not suggesting you do what I did and break up with your crappy friends, but I am suggesting that before you begin to resent them, it is time to start talking. What is it about them that you find yourself having to tolerate? Can it be fixed? If yes, talk to your friend and make some changes but if no, it is time to stop tolerating and move on. Work – How many times do we say, “Oh, I’ll get to that next week”, or “I am too busy to slow down and clean up”. Whether you like to admit it or not, it would probably take you less time to just actually do it than the amount of time you waste having these excuse conversations with yourself. Health – We are going to live forever, right? Wrong? We are stuck with the body we were given, so why not make the most of it? Unfortunately though, most of us tolerate that extra 20 pounds we carry. We promise that next Monday will be the day that everything will change, but it never does, and we just tolerate wearing tight clothes and being out of breath whenever we are forced to take the stairs. Home – The faucet is dripping, the closet door is broken, or the gutters need to be cleaned. We tolerate broken things and dirty things all the time, and man, do we ever like to complain and not do anything about it. We throw it on our spouse’s Honey Do List and hope it gets done, but let’s face it, it seldom does. If there is one thing you should do this year, it is to take a few minutes to write out a list of all the things that you put up with or tolerate in your life. Once you get the list, commit to checking off one or two items every week (or every day, depending on how long your list is). Each January I do this and wow, does it ever make me feel good (I even throw things on the list I already did, just so I feel accomplished right out of the gate). Life is good and you deserve to be happy! Stop tolerating and start tidying - but that’s just My Four Cents. |