This is how you can make frustration your best friend in any work environment; in your classroom, with your coworkers, or in the new staff training that you’re trying to implement. It’s time to get excited about this article. I’m going to give you four key things you need to do to make frustration your best friend. All right, let’s get right into the heart of this issue, because let me tell you, I have experienced frustration. I had so much frustration. I pulled my hair out. This used to be a lock. Now it’s not. I deal with it differently now. And I’m going to pass that along to you. We have four main things that we need to do. First thing in that culture, you’re creating frustration.
You may have coworkers right now. You may have people you’re teaching students, whatever that experience, higher levels of frustration with the material and with the environment that’s going on out there. And that’s where we start dealing with frustration. And what we really want to do is to start equating frustration to excitement. So if you’ve got an issue that, you know, you’re not able to solve, it’s not time to get more and more resistant. It’s time to embrace it because once you’ve embraced frustration, you’ll start getting creative about how to manage it and how to transform frustration in your office from something that’s like, “Oh no, no, no, we don’t talk about that. We don’t go there to, Hey, let’s start to get a little bit excited here because, do you know, and this is point number one, we’re linking frustration with excitement because, on the other side of the frustration is where we experience information utility.
Now, remember, in that other article, we talked about the importance of information and utility and how all content must have utility. If it doesn’t have utility, what’s the point? And if you didn’t watch that one, watch that one, because that will transform information inside your workplace. What I really want you to get is that now we’re in this space with almost a million hours, or three-quarters of an hour of content, just on one platform alone, being uploaded daily. It’s really important that the information that you’re uploading is high-impact and has utility to it, informational utility. So wherever we have frustration, we know that where on the other side of frustration is utility, there’s going to be benefit to it. Somehow, we just have to keep working on it. We have to, we have to, and this is point number three, you have to reframe it in your office where frustration is a good thing.
It’s okay. It’s good to get frustrated because now we’re going to get into a place of resourcefulness. We’re going to get into a place of problem solving. We’re going to start actually putting these concept maps up so that we can see how this all links to where we want to go and how this roadblock keeps stopping us. This is where frustration starts to get exciting. And that’s how we can totally take transformation within frustration. And I know that was a little rhyme, but the fact of the matter is it’s exciting. Frustration is exciting, and that’s the culture you want to create. That’s the culture of innovation. And if there’s anything right now that you’re going to need in the marketplace to compete, it’s innovation. You need to have people looking outside the box, taking that frustration and fueling ways to cure it, to fix it, to go around it, to go through it, over it, whatever it ends up being, use frustration as the springboard to innovation, which brings us to one of the most important parts of frustration and mental development. As you’re building this culture, as you’re building this team, what you need to do is attack it.
You need to attack it from all angles, but don’t worry about the fact that you have to solve it today. It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow. It may not be next week or next month. It may not even be in the next quarter, but have faith that you’re going to solve it. And you keep coming back to it. Do you remember? There was a silly, amazingly awesome card too, with John Travolta called Bolt. And there was… it’s a long story, but this guy was managing this client and he’s like, “Hey, you know, that’s a great question. Let’s put a pin in that and we’ll come back to that later. Well, that’s exactly what we want to do when you hit an issue that cannot be resolved; you start to map it out and you attack it from different angles. And when it’s so big that you can’t resolve it, that’s okay.
You put it up and you let your team, you let your mind, you let the process work; it’s magic, and it will start to stew. And you will start to get resourceful around that, and coming up with new and eight ways to attack that problem may take time. But I’m telling you, if you have a culture where it’s like, “This is our area of frustration right now, this is the area of concern that we’re addressing. But you know what? We don’t have all the information. We don’t have all the resources. We need some more information in this area, and maybe some more information in this area. And next week, in our staff meeting, we’re going to spend 15 minutes. We’re going to look at it again. Next quarter, we’re going to spend a whole day and we’re going to map out all the possible solutions and we’re going to come back to this area again. You know, Tony Booza did amazing work.
I mean, booza has been around forever. You’ve probably already heard about it and you’ve probably already done concept maps or mind maps. But when you’re looking at really transforming frustration in your office, you’ve got to really start. Considering the mind map, mind maps are ridiculously powerful ways to blow apart frustration and get people to get creative. Because surprisingly, in this day and age, there are lots of corporations, lots of companies that don’t use them. And if you’ve got something that’s frustrating, your clients, your staff, that’s frustrating, your little tiny microcosm of what you’re doing in your office, and you’re not using mind maps, you’re missing out because that’s how you can actually take the transformation from frustration to excitement. Transform excitement within your frustration into Lightman within your own office, by pre-framing by showing people this is a new tomorrow. We need to be frustrated in order to create a transformation. All right, guys, that’s how you start to take something struggling and make it great. Go out, do it, try it out in your office and let me know how it works.
