Dealing with Life Crises – Focus
Dealing with life crises are important to us all. When faced with startling events we must be able to respond in a positive way. Those that plan scenarios beforehand are often in a better position to excel.
Workplaces place a premium on our ability to deal with unexpected situation. I once attended an interview where I was asked to describe my experience with dealing with “what if?” situations.
I was a fortunate enough to remember when I was in a group looking after international visitors as a case study.
We had to work out how to deal with different people and their expectations in a culture different from where they lived.
Getting timely information helped our team leader quickly allocate people and resources to deal with the liaison work. We rapidly developed ways of working together with minimal conflict by first addressing issues in the spirit.
Being all part of one body, we joined hands and prayed together for the leading of the Holy Spirit in our activities and interactions. There were a few tense moments where I felt close to being overwhelmed. But in the end all interactions were productive.
I found that always volunteering for these services when the call came helped me in my own life situations.
I did not get this job but two years later I was to find myself working for this organisation as I had persevered when further openings came.
Regularly placing myself outside of my comfort zone ultimately led to my freedom from mental illness. A supportive wife with an environment that regularly threw challenges created the drive to normal mental health.
When I could no longer cope with managing the growing camera and sound team I was reassigned to the choir in church. There was never a shortage of relevance for my person. Years went by with each day seeing improvements in my personal organisation.
Mental illness is a life crisis on it’s own. It’s rarely treatable. Medication and other therapy often ends in relapse or development of other forms of ill health.
A long series of short victories catapulted me into my final testimony. God in His Word promises the return of wasted years.
When four years of unemployment followed my mental health recovery, the support I had from those close to me was second to none.
I was later to have a truly nuclear family with wife and child. Due to my past mental health record I faced even greater challenges in keeping my job paradoxically.
I had a clean bill of health for a decade but a breathing issue I developed from my first hospital admission still dogged me. I was not conscious of this issue initially. Later reviewing work assessments I found a note a decade earlier of a complaint of low -level burping.
Five years after I was to be made redundant on the basis of this. Two years following this Parliament passed mental health protection laws that could have kept me at work.
When the defense to my noisy responses to my breathing problems (real or imagined) was presented as a previous medical ill health condition I was still let go. It was on record I had recovered. I had a normal life without medication.
Everything was done by the book was done to appear to support me but the decision had been made to let me go on grounds of productivity. Being in the midst of other more pressing challenges I did not fight as much as I could have once the duplicity became clear. A fallback position of passive income by this time cushioned the transition into spending more time with the family.
The corona-virus epidermic proved to be the most current challenge in dealing with life crises. The SARS epidermic and swine flu hit a number of work colleagues. Covid 19 was to occur while I spent time out of employment with my family.
Crisis that affect the entire nation as opposed to an individual or narrow collective one has a different flavour.
I further discovered the liberation from stress of not making your work something you cannot do without. Dealing with life crises means being adaptable to rapid changes.
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