Daunting Task: Example

I’ll be honest with you and admit that even now there are usually jobs on my 'to do' list that cause me to emotionally close down. I’ll give you an example from yesterday.

For perhaps a month I have had the job of decided how much money I will cash in from a bond that I have. We’re talking about over ten thousand pounds of investment here, and the tax implications are an absolute pain with regard to cashing in some investments. I’ve been told conflicting information by my financial advisor and my accountant with regard to the tax implications of cashing in the aforementioned investment and this has left me feeling very daunted by the whole situation. One day my financial advisor told me that all the interest from my initial investment would now be considered as income and I would be charged full income tax on all of this interest. My accountant then told me that actually what I cashed in would be divided by the number of years that I had had the investment (which is over ten years) and only this figure would be taxed. My financial advisor then confirmed that this was correct. I have to make a decision on how much to cash in during this financial year by May 7th. It is now April 24th and I have just been really daunted by this task for the last month and a half. I had begun to adopt in the back of my mind a mentality that I believe usually plagues depressed individuals: the mentality that the task was going to be an ‘unmanageable task’. If my financial advisor and accountant were not sure of the tax implications how was I going to be sure? And the implications could run into thousands of pounds. Yesterday I finally decided to attempt to complete the task. It took ten minutes to make the three necessary phone calls, and all parties agreed on the nature of the situation. Actually the whole problem had been created by an error on the part of my financial advisor initially which has now been corrected and the new information has been validated by various parties.

The point of this example is that jobs are not unmanageable. When we actually get stuck in they can be completed. And the more we learn to tick off ALL jobs from our list each week the better we learn that we can get all these jobs done and the more confidence we have each time we approach our task completing sessions. And as a result of the increased confidence the faster we get at completing the tasks. We increase in Self-Efficacy. And we reap the resulting benefits.