Our attitude towards a problem tends to influence the quality of our solution.

A couple of days ago, Zone Alarm told me I had a virus that couldn’t be quarantined and must be deleted. I okayed the delete request and rebooted the machine. To be sure all signs of evil were gone, I deleted my temp files, emptied the recycle bin, checked the registry to make sure everything was fine in there, reset my System Restore points and rebooted again.

I ran Zone Alarm again and no virus. Great!

But as I opened my Outlook, a message came up telling me Outlook was unable to find my .PST file.

In case you don’t know, the PST file is where Microsoft Outlook stores all emails, drafts, work in progress, business contacts, personal contacts, phone numbers, appointments, schedules. For this file to go missing is a bit of a BIG deal!

When I said yes to Zone Alarm deleting the virus, I hadn’t spotted that the virus was in an email inside the PST file and that Zone Alarm was going to be deleting the entire PST file.

Grim news: That file was well and truly gone.

Solutions Orientated Approach

I was hit by the magnitude of what I’d lost. A couple of deep breaths later, I set to thinking about what to do. A solution was critical and I knew it wasn’t wise to go pressing just any button.

The worst case scenario was that I’d have to revert to an old, out-dated backup copy, re-write everything I’d started and hope that everyone who had emailed me would get in touch again. Pity I’d slacked on daily backups but what’s done is done.

And I was a couple of grey hairs wiser.

Pro-Active

Having resigned myself to this less-than-ideal scenario, I could more calmly focus. I found a site that told me how to recover deleted files. I got my file back but it was corrupted. I found another document that told me how to take away the corruption and soon I was back up and running. (You might want to bookmark these!)

As an unexpected bonus the virus was gone too!

An up-to-date backup file would have been really handy. BUT having that backup file would have not classified this incident as a disaster! It would been a mild inconvenience and I wouldn’t be writing this article.

My real backup were the people who wrote those articles and designed the recovery software that helped me find my way back.

What’s Your Backup?

Stressful situations abound.

An argument with a friend, losing a job, having a fear confirmed by the doctor… all these and more have the potential to throw us into an unresourceful state of mind where we focus on the “disaster” of the situation. It can throw us into a panic-fuelled frenzy where we do rash things or sink under the weight of the disaster.

Your backup STARTS with what you tell yourself about the problem.

You don’t have to lie to yourself and pretend to be all positive about it. You just have to accept that what’s happened has happened and that now, your focus is on finding some way to mitigate the fall-out and strengthen yourself in the process.

Your backup CONTINUES with what you do.

You might not have all the answers immediately. We don’t always have (or want) the knowledge to deal with something. I certainly don’t need to know how to code in C+ (or whatever) just in case my computer problems happen again. So long as I can get access to someone who does.

We might not have the knowledge we need, but what we DO have is the innate survival instinct that we can harness into helping us find what we need.

Your innate survival instinct doesn’t come from outside. It’s in you already. It can get crushed a bit when something heavy lands on it (like stress and pressure) – having backup means finding the resources you need to uncrush yourself so that what you get access to has a chance to work.

Your backup CONTAINS resources you can make work for your situation.

These resources can be:

INTERNAL – such as your religious or spiritual beliefs, your subconscious desires, positive self-encouragement…

EXTERNAL – such as therapy, coaching, a course, the right website, friends, fresh air, exercise…

If you need help, get help.

The important thing is that your backup supports you, develops you and empowers you to reduce the scale of the problem.

Einstein said “A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”

Problems are a fact of life. Knowing we can find backup makes it possible for us to avoid having problems that knock us down like skittles.

How do you deal with the “disasters” that happen? Where have you found your backups?