Shirking Responsibilities

HOT POTATO

In yoga they teach us how to avoid getting caught up in the emotions and sways of everyday life. It's difficult to remove ourselves from the day to day roller coaster, especially when we're caught up in the rush hour, stressed through delayed/cancelled public transport or crushed with someone's armpit in our faces - the things that are mostly out of our control. That's why it's important to practise methods for detaching ourselves to the negative things that potentially harm us and deplete our energy.

I get the impression that yogis don't negotiate their way on public transport in rush hour that much and I don't think they spend much time in office environments either. Maybe that's why they chose being a yoga instructor over an office based career, because they wanted to detach themselves from that daily assault that most of us have to put ourselves through...

So, if we can endure the daily commute during rush hour without getting affected, we are already using avoidance techniques. It's these methods that we can also employ for use in other situations too. One of the big stresses in our lives is work and that's where we need to find our best methods for detachment away from stress created and multiplied by others involved in the projects we collectively work on.

One of these techniques for detachment used by certain individuals in the work place, I call the hot potato. This is essentially where someone shirks their responsibilities by diverting the work onto their colleagues. This is not a helpful technique for those on the receiving end and arguably one of the greatest stresses we'll encounter - especially with those really hot potatoes!

It's a bit like the game of pass-the-parcel from nursery school. But instead of a toy in wrapping paper, imagine a hot ball of energy, that we all carefully take turns with. As we pass on hand to hand, each turn partially diffuses the heat as we all take our role holding it. Now picture when one person essentially bats it on to the next recipient without skimming some of the accumulated energy. Without energy being dissipated through the group's collective responsibilities, the energy ball grows hotter as it gains greater momentum. This creates an energy 'spike' and a potentially stressful situation for the following person/people to try and manage. More energy is used up and because the recipient wasn't prepared - their energy reserves are tapped into and depleted.

I witnessed this phenomena first hand in a group where I was working yesterday. One person's role was compromised, likely because they are now leaving their job for a new one. They had shirked their responsibilities and taken a day off without taking enough care to ensure their part within the team had been completed or covered with extra resources. This obviously affected the next two people further along in the chain. But everyone in this collective was affected to a degree as the stress-bomb hot potato takes it's toll on all that are close to it.

Some people can help avert a stress-bomb like this - whereas others will just pass on the potato making it even hotter. It's important to have advance awareness of these types of stress situations and know the people that potentially cause them. Because recognising when this situation arises and averting the damage caused well before the hot potato comes hurtling our way, will be one of the greatest stress avoidance techniques we'll master in life.