Inability to Prioritize

I am Prayag Shah, a 36 year old executive with a pharmaceutical company. I feel that since the last 14-15 years I am under a state of constant crisis. I feel that I am always moving from resolving one crisis to another and have no time for any relaxation. Sometimes it is financial crisis, solving taxation problems and looking at savings, if they get resolved then it the relationship that I have with my parents and sister, after that the domestic troubles with my wife and children.

The constant stress of career problems like inadequate pay, not enough jobs in the market, a fear of failure if I change my line of work, rejections from head hunters and no response from companies where applications have been made also add to my problems. It seems that I am running a race which has no finishing line and I cannot afford to move out of the running too. Please advise.

It seems, Prayag, that your problem is an inability to prioritize which problems to solve. It seems that you are not able to maintain the pursuit of any one problem and may be solving problems halfway and then abandoning them in the pursuit of another one. This leads to an accumulation of problems that remain unresolved and then come up as emergencies necessitating your attention and leaving you in a constant state of crisis. What is likely to happen is that in a state of crisis, you may be more prone to look for solutions that are temporary.

These solutions are not the best of solutions – even your mind knows that and therefore it is always going to be pressurized to find out the right solution but the mind will postpone it for a later time when there is a relaxed state of affairs. That time never comes and henceforth the problem mounts and comes up as an emergency later. This will result in you bringing solutions to the problems without ever moving forward in your life and henceforth find that life is becoming more and more stagnant with each passing day.

You will find that you might become scared of your desires as you are expecting that a desire will only add to the growing list of tasks to do. In this scenario, you will find that whatever activities fill up your day are only to bring temporary solutions and not permanent ones. The other factor guiding this whole behaviour may be your inability to accept the situation as the reality portrays it to be.

You may have a fantasy that your situation is not as pathetic as the problems seem to be but you may fail to wonder as to why you are the most unfortunate person in this world to have a constant crisis in your life. Is it that you are expecting much more than what can be delivered either by others or by yourself? Is it that you have a job and domestic life commensurate with your potential, but it is difficult to accept the situation? This can lead you to act from the fantasy and henceforth prevent you from looking at realistic solutions. You will start expecting magical solutions to the problems you are having and will procrastinate the actions. This will allow you to believe that this is a temporary solution only because of the state of crisis and henceforth you will believe that a better solution is around the corner when you have time.

This will help you preserve the fantasy in your mind and prevent you from getting depressed at the reality. For e.g. it might be possible that you may not be able to get a promotion in your job because of the base qualifications that you have. You may see that the company is bringing in people from other cities, employing new people so that they are at the top management simply because they are better qualified than you. You may not accept that and feel that it is because of your less work hours.

This may make you angry at your wife and children for taking away time and you may hold them responsible for the lack of promotion, threaten them with less benefits as they are interfering with your commitment to work and not accept the fact that your base qualifications (about which little can be done) are the culprit. So, a realistic acceptance of your situations and prioritization might help you get over the problems in a better fashion.