WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS….
My toddler poured lemon juice all over my brand new Mac… The gleaming, shiny mac was now squelching with sticky lemon juice that has required four trips to the Apple store to fix…
This on the back of dropping my phone down the loo, and meant I was having a tech-free time without my choosing.
Yep, I was mad and frustrated, and my toddler knows not to go anywhere near Mummy’s laptop… but it didn’t help my business, or my sanity!
VENT YOUR FRUSTRATION!
Once I’d allowed myself to breathe, I was able to see things more clearly.
Stopping to breathe when something goes wrong allows you to move from the emotional part of your brain, the “caveman” limbic brain to the logical “cortex”. In that simple move, you are able to think rationally, and approach the situation more effectively.
- Write out your frustration, and allow yourself to say ARRRRRGHHHHHHH!
- Think about what you can learn from the experience?
- How can you respond better?
- What can you do as an individual to take responsibility for this?
I then asked myself what I could improve to ensure the situation didn’t ever happen again (If I closed the lid on my laptop this would help).
- Ask yourself are there things you could do to improve your processes and systems?
And finally, this is the tricky one… how can you show up with LOVE? When you show up with love, and learn to see the situation as a learning experience. After the mac was being fixed and I was laptop-less, I started using pen and paper.
MAP OUT YOUR NEXT 90 DAYS:
Writing things down gave me a whole new perspective. I went back to strategically mapping out my business, and looking at the next 90 days.
What did I want to achieve?
I broke it down into each month, and each week, and started planning. I mapped out a course I wanted to write, and planned out my time. I focused on the key elements of the business, and mapped out what I wanted to achieve.
Suddenly the grey skies above my broken laptop weren’t thunder clouds… I could just about make out some silver clouds.
