Monday Morning

Motivation    8/8/2011

THE POSITIVE PLACE. SALES MOTIVATION AND PERSONAL GROWTH

Temporary problems, long term effects

As I write this, the stock market is on another one of its occasional meltdowns. People don’t realize that the alternating panic and euphoria of the markets is a phase -- I always remember the old adage that “This too shall pass.”

The problem with any problem, temporary as it may be, is that people treat the problems as if they are long term in nature, and their actions make them so.

Let’s look at the market as an example. We’ll divorce ourselves from the current market and look at the market meltdown of some years ago -- pick your year; they are all the same, ultimately. Doom and Gloom, Trouble and Bubble. For sophisticated investors who pick short-term gambles by going either long or short on the market, these temporary downturns can be a problem -- they wind up having to cover obligations if they bet in the wrong way. But for most investors, the ups and downs of the market are only important if they buy or sell stock, locking in the price. A woman I know did that -- she panicked at the bottom of the market, sold her retirement stocks, took a tremendous loss, and then watched as the market rebounded, the stocks recovered and gained beyond where she was when the markets tanked. In her case, the problem wasn’t that the market tanked -- it was that she committed to the downturn.

Now, I know I’ve lost many of you -- but let me explain why I’m wandering into this line of thought, aside from the fact that I have an interest in it.

In our lives, we have temporary ups and downs -- we have changes in relationships, job losses or gains, health challenges, family issues, and a number of other things. Most of these challenges are temporary in nature -- give them a few days, and they’ll resolve themselves or at least become more clear.

But most of us react to the temporary issue, and in doing so, we affect it and set it into stone. This may be good or bad -- setting good changes into stone is a good thing -- but in the long term, our permanent reactions to temporary situations becomes the defining moment.

Just think for a moment. Would you sell a car because the car had a flat tire? But often we will over-react to a temporary comment made by a family member. Would you cut your leg off because you had a bunion? But we’ll cut off a son or daughter because they made a silly mistake, or we’ll condemn a spouse for some insensitive remark they made on a bad day -- driving some people down the path toward divorce.

You’d never think of quitting a job because the company vending machine was out of Snickers bars, but people quit all the time for silly things that someone has said -- things that in the grand scheme of things, have about the same weight as the empty vending machine.

I watched over the weekend as the news media kept reporting about the “default crisis.” I figure Congress and the President are pretty much about the same as Professional Wrestling -- there are a lot of knockdown, drag-out fights, but in the end, it’s pretty much scripted; some people will get hurt in the process, but the politicians are ultimately just finding a way to get into your wallet -- and since they all want to do that, they’ll come to a method of accomplishing it.

But the damage all sides did -- from the politicians to the news media -- may have a lasting effect, if the people and other countries start to believe it was all real, and not just the usual tug-of-wars that break out in Congress from time to time.

In our lives, we have to keep our eye on the prize at the end, and not let these little events mean too much. It’s important to remember that in every big event (and we’ll turn again to the stock market as an example) there are winners and losers -- and that it’s not usually apparent until later whether you won or lost. Making life-changing decisions based on temporary challenges may be at times unavoidable, and sometimes, even desirable, but it’s important to keep your wits about you, so you don’t do something that will have a permanent bad effect because of over-reacting to a temporary situation.

Copyright, 2011, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.Weekdaywisdom.com.