#131 The Impact of Tiny Problems

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Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hi there, welcome back to Your Favorite You. 

I am still your host, Melissa Parsons, and today we're diving into something that might seem counterintuitive at first. That is the enormous impact of tiny problems in our lives. Have you ever gotten a very small pebble in your shoe, one that seems insignificant enough to ignore? 

By the end of this episode, I hope you'll understand why addressing that tiny pebble immediately might be one of the most important decisions you make. There's a tendency in our culture to dismiss small irritations and frustrations. 

Some people say focus on the big picture, or they say don't sweat the small stuff. But what if those tiny, persistent problems are actually creating major ripple effects throughout your life? What if ignoring them is costing you more than you realize? 

Today I want to explore why the size of the problem doesn't always correlate with its impact, how these seemingly minor issues tend to compound over time, and why the women that I coach often discover that what they initially dismissed as not worth mentioning, often turns out to be the very thing holding them back from achieving and having what they truly want. 

We've all heard the phrase, don't make mountains out of molehills. It's common wisdom that suggests that we shouldn't exaggerate small problems, but I'd like to propose that you think about it from a different perspective. 

Sometimes what appears to be a molehill is actually just the tip of a mountain hiding beneath the surface. Think about the last time you had something small bothering you. Maybe it was that slightly uncomfortable chair at work, that mildly annoying habit of your partner leaving cabinet doors open, or their socks on the floor by the bed every morning, or that minor task you've been postponing for weeks, like scheduling that download appointment that you've been putting off. Perhaps you brushed it off because it seemed too small to address, or you might have even told yourself you were being quote unquote too sensitive for even noticing it. 

Here's the thing about tiny problems. Their perceived size often has little correlation with their impact on our lives. That uncomfortable chair might be causing back problems that affect your sleep. 

That habit of open cabinet doors or dirty socks by the bed might be triggering deeper feelings of being the only one quote unquote who cares about your shared space. That postponed dental appointment might be allowing a small cavity to grow into something that requires a root canal. 

I have a client who is a brilliant marketing director. She came to me for coaching on what she called work-life balance issues. When we dug deeper, which we always do in coaching, we discovered that her actual problem was much smaller but more specific. 

She hadn't established a boundary around answering emails on her time off. This tiny habit was creating a constant state of mental engagement with work, preventing her from having a true reset when she was away from work. 

The solution was small, as they often are, but the impact of addressing it was enormous. Within weeks, she was reporting better energy levels, more focus at work, and better relationships with her team because when she came back from her time off, she was actually recharged instead of being resentful. 

The truth is we're actually quite poor judges of what problems deserve our attention and which ones don't. We're biased toward addressing what's urgent and obvious and in our face rather than what's subtly impactful over time. 

We're taught to be tough and to push through discomfort, which can lead us to normalized circumstances that are slowly draining our energy. our contentment, and our potential. Now you might be wondering how do I distinguish between being attentive to small problems and becoming overly perfectionistic? 

This is a common concern I hear from my clients when we start doing this work. The key difference is the impact on your well-being. Addressing small problems should reduce your stress and improve your life, whereas perfectionism tends to increase your anxiety and set impossible standards. 

So you can ask yourself, is this small issue actually affecting my life in a meaningful way? If yes, addressing it is healthy attention to detail and actually not perfectionism. So the first step is to stop judging your problems by their perceived size and start evaluating them by their actual impact on your life. 

That small piece of dirt in your shoe might seem insignificant compared to your career challenges or relationship issues. But if it's creating a wound that affects how you walk, which then affects your exercise habits, which then affects your health and your mood, well, suddenly that speck of dirt doesn't seem so trivial anymore. 

There's a concept in economics and in life called opportunity cost, what you give up when you choose one option over another. With every decision that we make, there is an opportunity cost. And every time we decide to ignore a small problem, we're incurring an opportunity cost that often far exceeds the effort it would take to address the issue. 

Let me give you an example. A client of mine who is a badass and runs her own consulting business had a small leak under her kitchen sink. It wasn't an emergency, not water spewing everywhere. It was just a few drops of water collecting in a bucket that she had to empty every couple days. 

She kept putting off calling a plumber because it seemed like such a minor issue compared to her client deadlines and her daughter's volleyball schedule. Several months later, she discovered that the slow leak had actually created mold behind her cabinets requiring extensive repairs that actually cost thousands of dollars and displaced her entire family from their home for a week. 

The opportunity cost of not spending an hour and a couple hundred dollars to fix the leak immediately was enormous. And of course, the irony is she had to reschedule many more of her client meetings and miss several of her daughter's volleyball games due to the home repair emergency than she would have had she just called the plumber when she first noticed the issue. 

This principle applies to many areas of our lives. Consider the following scenarios. you have a small misunderstanding with your colleague that you don't address because it seems petty, but it gradually erodes your working relationship and the dynamics of the whole team. 

Maybe you started into perimenopause and you ignored it because it's just how a woman's body is. That's what we've been taught to believe. And this leads to significant hormonal deficiencies affecting your energy, your mood, your sleep, your libido, your joints, all the things that those of us who are going through perimenopause go through. 

It might be the tiny habit of checking your phone first thing in the morning that gradually reshapes your attention span and increases your anxiety levels throughout the day. In my coaching practice, it's my job to see patterns. 

And a pattern that I have noticed is that women often wait until their small problems have snowballed into crises before seeking help. By then, of course, the solutions are often more complex, more expensive, and more disruptive than they would have been if addressed early. 

I frequently hear from my clients, I have so many small problems that I just don't even know where to start. If you're feeling this way, I would suggest that you start by listing them all out without judgment. 

And then you can look at the list and ask yourself which one, if I resolved it, would create the most noticeable positive change in my daily experience. Sometimes fixing one small thing creates momentum and it gives you the energy to start addressing the others. 

And also, you can consider whether some of your small problems share a root cause that could be addressed more holistically. This is also something I am a ninja at, helping my clients see how they do one thing affects how they do lots of things in their life. 

There's also a cumulative effect of small problems. Individually, each might seem manageable, but collectively, they create this constant background drain on your mental and emotional resources. Psychologists call this cognitive load or mental load. 

It's the amount of mental effort being used in your working memory. And each unresolved issue, no matter how small, takes up space in your mental bandwidth. We women keep so many browser tabs open in our brains and then we can't figure out why we're so exhausted. 

Think about how you feel when you finally fix that squeaky door that's been bothering you for months. There's a sense of relief that seems disproportionate to the actual problem. That's because the door wasn't just making noise, it was taking up mental space every time you heard it. 

It's the same with the hundreds of unread emails in your inbox. It feels so good to go in and clear them out. It's not about the unread emails, it's about the mental space that they take up every time you see that red dot on your phone with an astronomical number in the circle. 

The most insidious aspect of tiny problems is that we adapt so well to them. Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures and we can get used to almost anything, but adaptation doesn't mean elimination of the impact it has on your life. 

It just means that we've normalized the drain on our time and energy. We've gotten so used to feeling slightly off that we've forgotten what it feels to be fully on and alive. Also, there's an interesting paradox when it comes to problems and how we handle them. 

If there's a big rock in your shoe, you'll stop immediately and you'll remove it. The pain is just too intense to ignore, but that small piece of dirt might go unnoticed for hours or even days. slowly creating a blister or a wound that ultimately causes more long-term damage than the big rock would have. 

This metaphor, of course, extends to all aspects of our lives. The big, obvious problems command our attention and get resolved because they're in our face and impossible to ignore. It's usually the small, persistent issues that often create the most significant long-term damage because they fly under our radar. 

This makes me remember a client who came to me for coaching because she felt constantly drained despite getting adequate sleep. And when we examined her daily routine, we discovered a small dirt problem, a pebble problem. 

She was spending the first 30 minutes of every day responding to emails and messages on her phone while she was still in bed. This habit was triggering her stress response before she'd even started her day, setting up a pattern of reactivity that persisted for hours and typically all day long. 

The solution was simple. She just kept her phone on a dresser away from her bed, used an old-fashioned alarm clock to wake up, and started her day with a five-minute stretching routine instead of that 30-minute checking emails and messages. 

This is the solution that we came up with together. Of course, it may be different for you, but for her, within weeks, her energy level improved dramatically. She reported feeling much more in control of her day, and of course, her mood improved. 

Another client was struggling with her marriage, but she really couldn't identify any major issues. Her husband was faithful. They didn't fight about money. They mostly agreed on parenting approaches. 

But when we explored the patterns in their relationship, we discovered a tiny but critical issue. When my client shared problems from her day, her sweet hubby immediately jumped to offering solutions rather than just empathizing with her. 

This small communication misstep, repeated hundreds of times over years of their marriage, had created an emotional distance that of course was threatening their connection. The solution that we came up with was simply asking her husband if he would be willing to let her vent to him instead of him having to come up with solutions to her problems. 

Of course, he was willing to do this because he didn't know the solutions better than his wife did, took a lot of pressure off of him, while at the same time helping her feel better. Hopefully, you can see this was simple, but that the impact was transformative for their relationship. 

And I'm hoping that these examples illustrate why we need to develop what I want you to think of as sensitivity to small signals, the ability to notice and address minor issues before they become major problems. 

This requires a few things. The first thing is regular reflection and self-assessment. It requires creating space to actually feel what you're feeling. It requires you taking seriously the small things that repeatedly bother you. 

It requires you to recognize patterns in your discomfort. And then finally, it requires you to respect your intuition when it flags something as important, regardless of how trivial it might seem at the time. 

Developing this sensitivity isn't about becoming high maintenance or overly sensitive. It's really about respecting the profound impact that small daily experiences have on your overall well being and contentment. 

It's about acknowledging that sometimes the tiny pebble in your shoe deserves more attention than much larger challenges on the horizon. In my coaching practice, I can't tell you how often my clients begin our sessions by apologizing for bringing up what they perceive as small or silly concerns. 

I know this is silly. I know this shouldn't bother me, but it is a common opener. Does this sound familiar to you, my ladies? Yet, invariably, these small things turn out to be significant indicators of larger patterns or needs in their lives. 

The slight discomfort with how a colleague speaks over them in meetings reflects a broader issue of not feeling valued professionally. The minor frustration with their partner's household habits points to deeper questions about respect and shared household responsibilities. 

There are several reasons why women in particular might minimize their problems. The first is, of course, the cultural conditioning that encourages us to prioritize others' needs above our own. The second is being labeled as dramatic or emotional when expressing our concerns.

What woman has not been asked? Are you on your period by someone in their life when they're simply expressing something that concerns or displeases them? Drives me mad. The third is the internalized belief that our experiences don't merit attention. 

And the fourth is a tendency to compare our struggles to others who quote unquote have it worse. This fourth thing, this minimization becomes a trap that prevents us from addressing issues while they're still small and manageable. 

By the time a woman gives herself permission to acknowledge a problem as quote unquote big enough to address, it has often grown into something much more complex than the original tiny issue. 

One woman came to me for coaching on what she called minor time management issues. She felt slightly overwhelmed but was quick to emphasize that her problems were nothing compared to others. She repeatedly said, I shouldn't complain, as if she needed a permission slip to acknowledge her own experience. 

And as we worked together, it became clear that this lovely young woman was experiencing pretty significant burnout from being everyone's go-to support system while having no support system of her own. 

What she had dismissed as poor time management was actually a profound imbalance in how she valued her own needs versus other people's needs. She was the human equivalent of a phone charger. Everyone plugged into her for energy while her own battery drained to low levels. 

The lesson here is powerful. You can trust your discomfort. If something bothers you enough to notice it repeatedly, it deserves your attention regardless of how it compares to others' problems or how small it might seem in the grand scheme of things. 

Your experience doesn't need to qualify as a major life crisis to be worthy of addressing. Sometimes the small splinter in your finger deserves more immediate attention than larger abstract concerns because you can actually do something about the splinter right now. 

So as I wrap up this episode, I hope you're considering the small stuff in your life. It might be time to stop categorizing problems by their perceived size and start looking at them and evaluating them by their actual impact. 

To summarize, the perceived size of a problem often has little correlation with its actual impact on your life. There's always an opportunity cost to ignoring small issues. Unlike the big rock that demands immediate attention, the small people of dirt that small pebble in your shoe can create more damage precisely because it's easy to ignore. 

The issues we minimize or dismiss often contain important information about our needs and developing sensitivity to small signals can prevent major problems down the road. I would encourage you to take some time this week to reflect on the tiny problems you've been living with. 

What small discomforts have you normalized? What minor irritations keep resurfacing? What subtle patterns seem to be draining your energy? These might be exactly the issues most worthy of your attention. 

Remember, addressing these seemingly small matters isn't about being perfect or controlling every aspect of your environment. It's about respecting the profound impact that our daily experiences have on our overall well-being and contentment. 

Thanks so much for being here and listening. Until next time, pay attention to those pebbles in your shoes. They might be more important than you think. See you next week.

Hold up, don't go anywhere. Before we wrap up today, I want to invite you to take the next step in becoming your favorite you. If what we discussed today resonated with you and you're thinking, damn, I want more of this in my life, I have amazing news. 

I'm currently enrolling for my next Your Favorite You group coaching program starting April 23rd. This is a powerful six-month journey where you'll join a carefully curated group of incredible women who, just like you, are ready to stop settling for good enough and create lives that they truly love. 

Here's the thing, the window to join is closing soon. The last day to schedule your complimentary consult with me is April 18th. During this one-hour call, we'll explore if this group is the right fit for you and you'll walk away with clarity regardless. 

I only open enrollment a few times each year and several awesome women have already said yes to themselves and yes to joining us. So if something inside you is saying, maybe I should do this, I encourage you to listen to that voice and book a consult. 

You've got nothing to lose and potentially so much to gain. Visit melissaparsonscoaching.com forward slash group to grab a time on my calendar. I can't wait to connect with you and show you what's possible when you decide to become a favorite version of yourself. 

Until next time, remember you don't have to do this alone.