Episode #368 – We get what we tolerate

This is episode 368 of the Brilliant Balance podcast, and today we’re talking about why we get what we tolerate. I want to set this up with a story about the temperature in my office. I have to go back to 2016, the year we moved into the house where I live now.

That year, I had to decide where to put my home office, and I chose a room upstairs. That was my first mistake, as you’ll soon understand. The house has one thermostat on the main floor, and it’s a fairly large house. If you have a similar setup, you know the situation: we have a finished basement, a main floor, and an upstairs. The upstairs is super hot, the main floor is regulated to the desired temperature, and the basement feels like an ice chamber.

For someone like me, who is sensitive to temperature fluctuations, this was really frustrating. So, the first thing we did was install ceiling fans in all the upstairs rooms. This helped a bit, as we could turn up the ceiling fan to get some relief. A year or two later, feeling like it still wasn’t enough, I brought in a small floor fan during the summer and set it near my desk, which helped a bit more.

This year, however, I’d had enough. At one point, I looked around my office and realized I had added four small fans, in addition to the ceiling fan, just to make the room bearable. That was the moment I realized something wasn’t right—adding so many fans to a room shouldn’t be normal. So I decided something had to change.

When we first moved in, we’d looked into the possibility of installing a second thermostat to split the HVAC system. While it was technically possible, it was very expensive, so we didn’t pursue it. But this year, when we hit the breaking point, my husband found something on Amazon called a register booster. It’s a replacement for the floor vent register, with an adjustable thermostat, allowing us to get incremental cool air into the room.

In one day, we solved the problem. I removed all the fans and even turned off the ceiling fan. We quickly installed these register boosters in the other upstairs rooms too. My son’s room, which had always been chronically hot, was suddenly comfortable.

When I tell you this story, it’s a little embarrassing. I wish I’d thought of this solution back in 2016. Instead, I tolerated incremental improvements until I believed the problem was unsolvable—a “gravity problem,” as I call it, something you simply can’t change. But the moral here is that very few problems are actually gravity problems; we just treat too many of them as if they are.

So today, I invite you to think about where in your life you’re tolerating something because it feels easier than fixing it, or because you’ve convinced yourself it’s unsolvable. I want to share a simple problem-solving methodology you can use in these situations. These might be minor annoyances around the house, or they could be significant areas of your life that could be vastly improved.

We are naturally adaptive and great problem solvers, but we have to pause long enough to allow ourselves to solve problems. When we’re overloaded, we often don’t take the time to pause and reflect. We just keep going, and as a result, miss opportunities to improve. So I want you to go on a treasure hunt for things you’re tolerating. When you start looking, you’ll see them everywhere.

What are you accommodating? It might be something like me with my four fans—making a wacky adjustment to cover up a situation you’re just tolerating.

The first step in the problem-solving methodology is to expose the problem. Recognize something in your life that you’ve grown so accustomed to that it now seems normal, even though you’d like it to be better. Look broadly—this could be something in your home, your workplace, a process, or even a behavior pattern with your partner.

Once you’ve identified a problem, the next step is to examine the causes. I often say, “double-click” on the problem to really understand what’s going on. For instance, if you’re constantly digging out of an overloaded email inbox, ask yourself why. Is it because you’re subscribed to lists you don’t value? Or maybe an auto-sort feature you rely on has stopped working, leaving everything in your inbox.

Once you understand the root cause, you can explore potential solutions. For example, in my office, we needed to increase the cold air output from the HVAC vent. Moving the office to a different room could have worked, but we ultimately opted for a register booster.

Then, execute an improvement. Test one solution to see if it works—it’s like running a small experiment. Afterward, evaluate the results and decide if you need to try another approach.

I don’t want us to get stuck on small examples like an inbox or room temperature, though. This process can apply to bigger things you’re tolerating at home or work. Recently, my team reviewed our client onboarding process. Over time, it had become unwieldy, taking too long and confusing clients. We started by making a checklist of all steps, but that only partially solved the problem. Eventually, we decided to schedule a meeting where we walk clients through the steps together. This approach reduced time, improved clarity, and minimized stress for new clients.

This is an example from the workplace of identifying a process that, over time, we came to tolerate. But now, we’ve improved it, and it’s better for both us and our clients.

So today is your invitation to look at where you might be tolerating something that could actually be improved. Have you paused long enough to ask yourself if there’s a problem? Have you examined the causes? Have you explored potential solutions? Once you do, you may find that the first thing you try works, or that it takes a few iterations to reach the best result.

In the examples I gave, none were particularly hard, time-consuming, or expensive. They just required us to stop tolerating the annoyance and commit to finding a better way. That’s my challenge for you today: find something in your life, try this process out, and see if you can find a better result.

If you’re new to the Brilliant Balance podcast, welcome! I’d love for you to follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode. You can also find the Brilliant Balance community on Facebook, where we have a positive, supportive group of women sharing ideas. If that sounds like a fit, please join us. You can also follow me on Instagram at @cskolnicki, where we share podcast content and more throughout the week.

That’s all for today. Until next time, let’s be brilliant.