Today’s coping tip is to build new ideas by thinking “Yes, and what if…”.
I tend to look for the holes, problems, limitations, and downside of various proposals. I’ve always been good at finding potential issues and mitigating them. It’s a skill that served me well as a database administrator.
However, I’ve been trying to be more positive and opportunistic the last few years. I try to look for the upside. Not that I ignore the downside, but I try to look forward and up first.
This tip is interesting to me, and I had to use this recently. I coach competitive volleyball for teenagers and this year has been a little trying. A MH I thought would round out our team got moved to another one. Then I had a kid who was injured all of last year and I wasn’t sure how she would fit in the team. Then another kid dropped out. Instead of a strong 12 set of hand picked kids, I had 10, two of which I was unsure about. Worse, I really only have 1 MH.
However, my wife and I looked for the upside here. We know we can teach kids to pick up different roles and we’ve been successful growing athletes in ways they didn’t expect. We started to think what if we moved X to MH and then used Y as a RH. What if we look at a 6-2 instead of a 5-1 and find a way to skip the need for a sub in two of our rotations?
There are lots of ways to search out opportunity and this coping tip reminds me to do that in all parts of my life. Look for possibilities first.
I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.