Do you ever have one of those days where you wake up and nothing goes as planned? Well, I seem to be having one of those days today. I woke up intending to create a presentation for a group of my clients, and my presentation software isn’t working. So, I did what any person would do, and I contacted support. Now, of course I didn’t plan appropriately that today is a holiday.
But, the point of this whole post doesn’t really deal with holidays. It has to deal with the fact that when some days don’t go as planned, you need to have a process and a system for getting back in alignment and being able to make progress anyway. We’ll talk more about that here.
So, I contacted support, and support emails me back and says today’s a holiday, so we need to escalate your support issue to a higher level of a technical engineer, and those people are basically on holiday; so, you may not hear from us until tomorrow.
That was the first thing that didn’t quite go as planned. The second thing that didn’t quite go as planned was again, I forgot it was a bank holiday. I get all of my bank deposits together, and I go to make the deposit only to find out that bank is closed. So, again, if I had just remembered it was a holiday and actually what that meant; I might have been able to save myself a trip to the bank.
Again, that’s not that big of a deal. Except, than I logged into my computer, and I went to check my email and my email has gone all wonky. So what that means that all of the rules have somehow gotten messed up. All of my emails are being routed to the wrong places, and nothing is working quite as I’ve planned. So, again, I need to get in touch with my tech team and luckily their not on holiday today. But, anyway, I have to get that fixed up.
So, the point that I want to make is that some days you wake up and you have a day like mine has been, and it’s only 11:30 am as I write this post. So when you have a day like mine has been so far, you have a couple of options.
The first option is to recognize that this too shall pass. What that means is no matter how upsetting, frustrating, annoying, goofy, or anything your day has been – that eventually the cycle will turn and you’ll get out of this crazy place, and everything will be working as it should be. So, the first strategy is – this too shall pass.
The second strategy is that you may need to pull back on your level of goals or the amount of goals that you have for this particular day. That’s probably what I’m going to do. While I woke up with a long list, I’m actually going to pull back and try to get just get a couple of items taken care of.
I’ve read information that says if you can accomplish just 3 things in a day, you’ve had a really good day. Now, I typically don’t live according to that guideline. I tend to accomplish 10-15 things in a day. But, on a day like today, that’s probably not going to happen. So, the second step is to fall back and limit what you think you’ll accomplish that day.
The third step is to look at this from the perspective that things may be breaking down because you are about to have a breakthrough. That’s a really important concept because when things go out of whack and stop working, and all these things pile up in one day – it’s easy to feel like you are out of control and that everything is falling apart. It’s easy to just feel like you have no control, and everything is going to get worse, and worse, and worse.
It’s really important to remember that whenever you are moving to a new place; whether it be metaphorically or symbolically or actually (if you are moving to a new office or trying to grow your business bigger), all of those times will look like things are out of control and like they are breaking down.
So, the thing I remind myself of very often is that when things look like they are breaking down, it may actually be that I’m breaking through. So, when you have days when you can’t get in touch with tech support, you can’t meet the goals that you’ve set for yourself, and in general you’ve been overall inefficient and unproductive; try one of these 3 strategies or even all 3 at the same time to help yourself get back to feeling well and growing your business.
