Their Problem Isn’t Your Problem | Why You Shouldn’t Rob People of Their Challenges
How often is your weekend taken by someone else agenda?
We all have higher maintenance people who’ll make their problem ours whenever they can. They remove us from our purpose. A purpose of making a high-level contribution to our goals.
Well to put it simply,
- Their dilemmas aren’t your concern.
- Their complications aren’t yours to deal with.
- Their disputes aren’t yours to resolve.
That’s a puzzle for them to figure out.
Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t help people, because we should.
Caring, loving, and making a meaningful impact on people’s lives is what we should all be doing.
But when their problem becomes ours, one that they are perfectly capable of dealing with by themselves, we are no longer helping, we're enabling.
What we’re doing is removing their ability to solve their challenges.
Imagine you have a neighbour.
He never waters his grass or plants, but whenever you go to turn on your sprinkler system, the water mainly ends up on his flora and only partially on yours.
Your grass isn’t doing nearly as well as it should be doing and you know it. Meanwhile, your neighbour looks down and sees his garden flourishing.
”My gardens doing fine” he thinks to himself and thus he doesn’t develop the habit of watering his plants.
Now everyone loses.
You wasted your efforts and he can’t solve his problems for himself.
The solution?
Put up fences to keep his problems out of your garden and in his.
Many people in life will try to utilize your sprinkler system.
This is why you need to have your fences in place for these people.
Have them set well in advance too.
Setting your boundaries early eliminates the need for a direct “no”.
It just makes it easier for everyone to deal with, you don’t have to potentially harm the relationship with a no and they will already have an answer to their query before even asking you.
When we don’t set clear limits in our lives we can end up imprisoned by the limits of others.
Forcing people to solve their problems is equally as beneficial for you and them.
JR
References
Mckeown, G. (2020). Essentialism: the disciplined pursuit of less. New York, NY: Currency, An Imprint Of Random House.