I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. She didn’t have my number, so she gave me her phone to type in my information. As I started to habitually type my name in her phone, I noticed that the letters were not in their usual places on the keyboard.
Rather than the common QWERTY keyboard layout, it was set to the AZERTY layout. That layout is more common in France and Belgium, as it is designed to make typing French accents and characters more efficient.
The unusual keyboard layout forced me to slow down and hunt for the letters.
When I made a comment about the layout, my friend expressed her frustration that they keyboard wasn’t “normal.” She didn’t know how she ended up with that keyboard.
I offered to fix it for her, and in under 30 seconds, I switched her keyboard to the QWERTY keyboard she was used to.
She said it had been the “wrong” way for a year.
A full year. Instead of inquiring about fixing it, she simply acclimated herself to hunting for letters, giving in to the quiet frustration of an unusual keyboard layout.
She’s not alone in this pattern.
For years, as a residential real estate agent, I’d tour clients’ homes and learn about the little quirks they had learned to live with: a fussy light switch, an uneven table, a leaky faucet.
All things that had easy and simple fixes — if only you’d call a person capable of fixing them.
But because they are small things, we don’t think about calling someone. It somehow feels “not worth the effort” to “bother” someone to help us fix such a little thing. Better to suffer in silence.
Until you stumble upon someone who can quickly fix the issue. And then you realize how much extra energy you had expended to work around the broken thing.
Those tiny inconveniences are energy leaks. When we grow accustomed to tolerating them, we don’t realize how much they consume from us.
Sometimes the fix is easier than you think.
What are you tolerating that you don’t need to be tolerating? Where can you reclaim some energy?
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