Why do problems feel bigger when we avoid them?
A notice arrives about your registration for a local craft fair. You glance at the heading—something needs correcting—then put it aside without reading further. Perhaps your place has been cancelled. Perhaps you missed a requirement you cannot now meet. Reading it feels like the moment those possibilities might become real.
Yet leaving the rest unread does not keep them outside your day. You think about the notice while doing other things. Each possibility remains available because you have learned nothing that would rule it out.
Avoidance can make a problem feel larger this way. Its possible consequences occupy your attention, while its actual extent and your possible response remain unknown. You are living with what it might demand before finding out what it does demand.
A Spark from The Vision
A problem or difficulty is only imposing when you sit around doing nothing about it, but when you stand up to it, its stature will be laughable.
In Strategy and execution, Innocent contrasts being directed by a problem with bringing one’s own decisions and actions to it. His confidence comes from the difference a capable response can make. A difficulty viewed from a distance has not yet met what the person facing it might do.
Suppose you read the notice. It asks for a description of what you intend to bring and gives a date by which to supply it. Your place has not been cancelled. There is still a requirement to meet.
This may not feel like immediate relief. You have been uncertain which of your work will be ready, and now you need to decide what you can honestly offer. The letter has revealed a real difficulty. It has also stopped that difficulty from including every feared outcome at once.
You can find out what must be specified now and whether any details can change later. You can look at the work that is ready, instead of continuing to imagine a demand you have not read. If the available time is insufficient, you can say so and ask what follows.
The notice gives you a basis for choosing among those responses. Reading it did not complete the preparation. It gave preparation something actual to answer.
Knowing the difficulty changes what waiting means
Before reading, waiting kept the requirement unknown. Afterwards, you might reasonably wait for an answer from the organiser or take an evening to decide what can be ready. Those delays have a purpose you can name. They are different from repeatedly putting the notice aside because you do not want to encounter its contents.
Sometimes the contents will be worse than expected. A deadline may really have passed, or a needed change may be beyond what you can do. Facing the problem is still not a promise that it will become small. It lets you distinguish what can be answered from what must be accepted, discussed or met with help.
You can ask someone to sit with you while you read a difficult message. Their presence need not make the contents less serious. It may make it easier to remain with the actual words long enough to understand them.
The useful change is not that you have become fearless. It is that the problem no longer has to be considered without your knowledge, questions or choices entering the account. Even an unwelcome answer gives you a different starting point from all the answers you feared it might contain.
Related lessons
AI-generated from Innocent Mwatsikesimbe's writing.
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