If you watch the TV show Modern Family, maybe you’ve seen the recurring joke about the faulty step in the Dunphy home. Every time the dad (Phil) runs up or down the stairs, he has a minor trip over one step and yells out, “Gotta fix that step!” Now in Season 8, the step has yet to be properly repaired.
Do you have a “gotta fix that step” in your life? Maybe yours is not a physical step that literally trips you up, but I’ll bet you have things (or people) that break your rhythm, wear you down, or interrupt your flow. If so, you have what we coaches call a “toleration.”
A toleration is anything that persistently drains you of time, energy and focus. They are the unnecessary irritations that cause you to feel sapped, frustrated, or tired. A toleration is a burden that eats up time, money, and/or mental space.
Tolerations are often small things. For example, our family owned a Honda van that was a great van, but had one very annoying “feature.” At about 130,000 miles, the light for indicating the van was in Drive stopped working. As you shifted from Park to Reverse to Neutral, the indicators above the steering wheel followed right along, but when you got to Drive, all was blank. In the whole scheme of things, it was no big deal, but every time I put the van in Drive, I felt a little mental trip and said to myself, “Gotta fix that light.”
Tolerations can also be big things. For example, our family lived in the Pacific Northwest for several years during which we tolerated the lack of sunlight during the winter months. As you may know, lack of sunlight can lead to a Vitamin D deficiency and eventually to the blues and even depression. Though we were able to put up with it, the lack of sunlight drained us of energy and positivity.
Tolerations can have an external source (a step, a van, the weather), but they can also come from you: working in a job you don’t enjoy, being overweight, having too many projects you’ve stared and not finished, or being too controlling.
As coaches, we work to help people live meaningful, successful lives. One way we can do this is to help our clients eliminate tolerations. Getting rid of a toleration gives the client more time, energy, money, and focus. Getting rid of several tolerations can make a profound and positive difference in a client’s life.
So how do you help remove tolerations? Here are some steps to take with your clients (and with yourself to remove YOUR tolerations):
Name the tolerations. You can’t deal with what you don’t see, so learning to spot tolerations is the first step toward getting rid of them. Make a list. By the way, if you’re not sure if something is a toleration or not, put it on the list anyway. To help you with this, we have a free download you can use for your list.
Give yourself permission to live a toleration-free life. Some people continue living with tolerations out of a false or misplaced sense of humility. You have to experience an internal shift away from “Tolerations are just a part of life,” toward “Tolerations are pollutants that nobody should have to endure.” Aiming for a life void of tolerations isn’t selfish or crazy. What you do with your life no matter how many tolerations you have is what makes is selfish or not. Feel free to get rid of tolerations so you can be the most selfless, generous, godly person you know.
Choose the right tactic for dealing with each toleration. There are four basic tactics for dealing with tolerations, and each tactic corresponds to a particular type of toleration. Here are the four types of tolerations and the corresponding tactic:
- For minor tolerations that are within your control, take action now to knock it out. Then knock another, and then another. For example, I once had a printer that was located in a different room on a different floor than my home office. Every time I printed something, it was a two minute walk up the stairs, across the house to the printer, and then back. For $75, I bought a second printer and the toleration was gone.
- For minor tolerations that are outside your control, be willing to accept and move on. When the Honda mechanic told me it would cost over $2,000 to pull out the entire dash in order repair the tiny Drive light in my van, I decided that this was no longer a toleration. Instead, every time I put the van in Drive, I imagined how much money I was saving by letting “no light” indicate to me the van was in Drive. Sometimes I would even say, “Cha-ching!” to celebrate the cost savings. The toleration was eliminated.
- For major tolerations that are within your control, be willing to invest time and other resources to remove the toleration. When we decided we’d had enough of the gray and depressing Pacific Northwest winters, we invested quite a bit of money and effort to move to the sunnier Southeast. Getting rid of that major toleration was a lengthy process, but the cost of the transition was worth it. For these kinds of tolerations, you have to count the cost and make the investment.
- For major tolerations that are outside your control, look for ways to minimize or avoid the toleration, and feel free to request the help of those around you. For example, if you have a family member who says shaming or otherwise hurtful things when you visit, you might reduce the times you visit and also develop appropriate strategies for responding when she speaks unkindly. This may also be a time to set appropriate boundaries and to enlist the help of other family members in enforcing those boundaries. You might have to “live with” the toleration to some extent, but you don’t have to live with it the same way you’ve been living with it.
Finally, recognize that one person’s toleration is another person’s way of life. Just because my far away printer was a pain for me doesn’t mean it would be for someone else. In fact, I once shared my printer story in a class and had several students say how it would be a blessing to have an excuse to get up and walk for a few minutes. Between you and me, I think they were Fitbit fanatics.
So what about you? What are you tolerating? What tolerations have you eliminated or reduced and how’d you do it?
Tolerations Resource
We have developed a worksheet that will help you or your client identify tolerations and a plan to remove them. Subscribe to our email list to get this free resource.
