I’d like to invite you to do a quick thought exercise:
Close your eyes for a moment (make sure you’re sitting before you do so). Now, thinking back over the last week or two, bring to mind a tricky situation you were in during that time. (There weren’t any? I don’t believe you!)
And now I have a question for you: Are you still in that tricky situation – or did you manage to get out of it?
If you answered that you did indeed manage to get out of it, how did you do so?
- Did you bulldoze your way out of it, trampling on others en route?
- Did you apologise your way out of it? And did you really mean that regret that you so elegantly expressed?
- Did you gracefully retreat back along the path that took you to that tricky place, without meeting any resistance and without doing any damage on the way?
And now one further question: Is your integrity still intact?
If your answer to my earlier question about whether you managed to get out of the tricky situation is “No. I’m still there”, then I would ask, “Why? Did you find the path of retreat blocked? Bridges burnt, perhaps? Or do you find yourself now sitting in the charge office at the local police station?”
What do you plan to do about it? Since you can’t retreat and since advance is the only option, how exactly are you going to move forward?
I wanted to present to you an idea, one that I came across while reading an article in the 1960 edition of Rhodesiana. The article is entitled Rhodesia Pioneer and is written by Rev. Rather W. F. Rea, S.J. It starts as follows: “For many reasons, Rhodesia is in the news. It is a rapidly developing country with great possibilities.”
Those possibilities, as we now know, were never realised. Furthermore, the fact that there were indeed such ‘possibilities’ was a manifestation (one of many) of the rampant imperial campaigns of the 19th and early 20th centuries that swept through Africa bringing its native populations under colonial subjugation.
I don’t want to take you on a history tour right now. More to the point is that, having embroidered the British colony of Rhodesia of the mid 20th century as a cauldron of ‘possibility’, in the second paragraph Father Rea, to his credit, demonstrates insight into the conundrum that actually prevailed (and this was well before the civil war that ripped at the soul of the country in the 1970s) by writing that “If we want to get out of a difficult situation, we should examine how we got into it in the first place. In other words, we should look to our history.”
Let’s look at this again:
If we want to get out of a difficult situation, we should examine how we got into it in the first place.
This, in my view (and I am not referring to Rhodesian history here, but to life in general), is wise counsel indeed.
Considering the historic route by which you got yourself into a tricky situation (and lets consider the one that I earlier asked you to bring to mind) may offer some clues as to how to get out of it.
I wish you every success in your endeavours and would invite you to plan your retreat (or forward progress) with a strong commitment to maintaining (or restoring) your integrity (whichever the case may be!) and with an equally strong commitment to avoiding any further collateral damage to those whose welfare you may already have compromised.
If the situation that you’re in is so tricky that devising a plan for getting out of it could do with a collaborative approach, feel free to read more about my approach to counselling, mentoring and life-coaching and then to message me.
