In business, and especially in my kind of business, I have found that you either take control of a situation or it will take control of you. This is true of things as simple as conversations, meetings and personal interaction, but if you don’t start from the beginning and set the tone on something, then you could quite possibly wind up having direction given to you.
Recently, I found myself in a couple of situations that seemed to have taken control of me. Some involved work, others involved people outside of work where I felt like I was merely playing defense and was back-peddling like a defensive cornerback in a football game. These situations caused me to be a little edgy and took me out of my typical character and altered my behavior. To put it bluntly – they were causing me to not be me. Which is the beginning of a disaster in most cases.
There were a lot of nights with little or no sleep. I found myself waking up early in the morning and letting these thoughts dominate my mind and cause stress. And stress is really only good for Big Pharma Companies and the makers of alcohol. So, after seeking some wise counsel and talking to a few friends whom I trust emphatically with their guidance and direction, I decided to tweak some of the things I was doing each day to not allow myself to be put in this position.
My mind centered around – “When things don’t go your way… make a change so they can start going your way.” Here is some of what I did to work through it:
- Increased my efforts in providing daily praise to people around me. I made it a goal to thank or encourage 2 people every day that I normally wouldn’t, and then to try to do a favor or something nice for someone else every day. Three moments like this in a day times 7 days a week means that is 21 positive interactions that occur each and every week.
- Decreased my exercise routine. Ok, this sounds like the opposite of what you do when trying to alleviate stress, but follow my logic. By working out 1 less day a week, I now have 1 day a week where I can get up and out of bed at the same time, and rather than work out/recover/shower for close to 2 hours a morning, I can dedicate 2 extra hours a day to work, and doing it first thing in the morning means you get out ahead of your day.
- Increased my proactive approach to everything. In the past, I would wait on a lot of things to happen or would have said, “let me think about it.” Now, I have moved to the I would rather make a fast decision and have it possibly be wrong camp rather than make a slow decision (still with the chance of being wrong) just so I can have less to think about.
All of these minor modifications have made a huge impact on how I feel, my confidence level, and the results I am seeing from getting more out in front of things.