Giving the right “Push”
Lighting the path forward
The world is not for the weak hearts. Beyond your circle of contacts and dear ones, there is a realm where only the best survive and it takes commitment and the will to push forward.
We all will have to face it eventually. And when the moment comes, your experience will only help you out of it.
How do you shape a strong personality to ensure success and progress? Let us see what does it take to provide the right push to persuade an individual to perform better.
Too soft →you will never understand it right
Most of us are brought up with the silver spoon, in our cocoons where life is safe and every problem is easily solved by our care-givers. This is essentially when we are growing through our primary years as having a carefree mind creates happy memories to cherish in the years to come.
But when that gap is taken far too long, we become reluctant to face those challenges when we have out grown the care free age. If we take this far too lightly, one will never take responsibility and will always look for someone to come forward and solve the problem. And when you escape the situation, you just make the next occurrence even harder.
Too harsh →you will scar them for life
This is the other end of the spectrum, where one is pushed way to far to be accountable, sometimes much before the time is ripe.
It causes the individual to dislike the task as they were forced without the reasoning seeping into their minds. It leaves scars in the mind that may harm them even years later. Those who push you expect you to understand the why later, but little do they realize that the shock does not really leave you and you are in a state of limbo.
Life becomes quite arduous in this manner. Children with traumatic past where they experience the harsh world loose the joy in their life and finding happiness becomes a challenging process.
Finding that balance →the internal push
So where is the middle ground in this field? How to measure the right force for an individual?
It is not easy. Which is why as the one who is going to push, one must be prepared. Try to think from the other persons shoes — why is she saying no to task X? What scares her about it? Is it the one time bad experience? Or sheer laziness?
Next, approach her and talk to her calmly. If you show your respect for her emotions, it is highly likely that she will at least listen to what you have to say. Somewhere within herself, a voice will be reverberating to your words even though her mind takes defensive route.
Give her time to think about it. Ensure the atmosphere is calm for her to not feel overwhelmed about it. Try to not let your voice be the focus, but rather the essence that you are trying to communicate.
Worst case, she will still not think logically and return a stiff no. Rationality will fail to make sense to both parties. This is the most important phase because this is where you need to remain calm. Give her some more time, and some more space. Try to come up with a mechanism that makes her think about the matter rationally, like sticky note reminder or her own explanation on paper. Give her mind means to flush out all the anguish within.
You can take help from mutual friends and relatives if it helps but ensure it is not at the cost of her trust in you. It is more likely that she will accept task X when someone whom she has a more welcoming view of encourages her.
To put it in short, you take gradually receding steps. It is similar to how we convert decimal numbers to binary:
- Input the target number (84)
- Find biggest power of two less than target →add it to 0 and shift (64).
- Repeat 2 for the biggest power of two that fits within the difference of current number at target and add it to current number (16, 4).
- Finally by the time you reach target, you realize what leaps you had to take (84 = 64 + 16 + 4 → 1010100).
So when you need to understand the push she needs, try to gradually estimate how close can you get to her in such steps — if you overshoot she will find it to be harsh but if you undershoot it will be too soft to be meaningful.
This is not easy and there are a lot of books to help people develop this skill of estimating the support one needs. From personal experience, speaking from ones own past successes and mistakes help others to find meaning in doing a task he/she fears to.
Encouragement and forgiveness plays vital role at times of failures. Always be there to support the person and always give second chances. There might be situations where you need to infer that task X does not suit the person despite all your efforts — if that happens, do not be disappointed. Maybe something better is in place for the person. You did your part of supporting. Though it did not directly translate in to an end result, deep inside that person will be grateful for your effort and that will help in the future.
In a world of 7 billion dreams, it is easy to miss out a couple of them. If you spot a few, offer a hand to pull them up even if they do not directly impact in your future. Some day, you will look back to see them return the favor to others and realize that you were part of a positive chain effect.
All it takes is a push. A ‘right’ push.
