5 Things To Remember When You’re Having A Bad Day

Linda LaitalaBusiness, EmployeesLeave a Comment

Bad days.  Everyone has them.   

  • You step into a moist, squishy gift from your pet as you step out of bed.
  • You drop your toast, jam-side down, in your lap. (Of course you’re wearing your last clean pair of pants.)
  • Your new assistant doesn’t show up and doesn’t call. (Yesterday’s project has boxes and files strewn all over your office.)
  • Lunch comes and goes—you’re too busy to take a break.
  • You’re already late for your daughter’s football game when you leave work; and wouldn’t you know—you have a flat tire.

As bad as your bad day seems, it can’t last forever.  You just have to keep moving forward and know that…

1.  You’re one step closer to a good day

Things didn’t go so well today, but bad days don’t last forever and your bad day will end eventually.

 2.  It’s not as bad as you think

When I’m having a bad day invariably someone will say, “It could be worse.”  It’s such a dismissive and shallow comment; of course it could be worse.
“It’s not as bad as you think” is different.  With the exception of life-changing emergencies almost every bad thing is based on your perception of it.  Every minor challenge you encounter on a bad day gets exponentially larger until you feel like you’re going to snap—even though, in reality, most of those challenges can be easily solved.
A helpful thing to do when you find yourself in one of those snowballing days is ask yourself, “Will I remember this in 10 years?” Unless it’s something huge, chances are you won’t. In fact, you won’t even remember it by the end of the week.  Let it go.

3.  There’s always a payoff

Every bad thing I’ve been through has taught me something.  From something as simple as learning to sew without pricking my finger, to the complexities of dealing with a sudden death, each experience has a lesson.  There is value in pain that you will find nowhere else in life.
That’s what promotes growth—the idea that there’s always something better than where you currently are.

4.  Small pieces are easier to handle

Don’t start big projects if your day isn’t going well.  Break your project and your day into quarters.  You start at 8 AM–pound out as much work as you can.  When 10 AM rolls around pat yourself on the back and tell yourself, “Awesome.  I’m already through the first quarter of the day.  Lunch will be coming up soon.”  It might sound simple and maybe a little ridiculous, but smaller, two-hour bursts are much easier to handle.  Breaking time into small pieces keeps it manageable. At the end of the day you can look back and be proud of what you’ve accomplished.

5.  You’re going to make it a better day

Few of us give much thought to someone else’s bad day. It never dawns on us that a person dealing with the public may have been called in on his day off after only a few hours of sleep. Or that his pet died. But as the saying goes, “What have you done for me lately?” Suddenly 700 days of spotless service mean nothing to the customer when compared to that 20 seconds of sub-par service your bad day caused them, however justified it was.

Now consider this:  the very next person to talk to you (while you’re in the midst of a bad day) is going to think the exact same thing about you.  They have no idea the circumstances behind your bad mood.  Guess what’s going to happen with the rest of their interactions today.

Instead, be the link that ends that chain. As your company’s leader, you need to be the one who grits her teeth and says, “S#%!* happens, but I’m not going to let it get to me. I have too much to do to let a relatively minor problem wreck my day.”

It’s not the world’s duty to make your day better.  It’s totally on your shoulders to understand how and why you react in a certain way to certain triggers.  You need to make the changes and adjustments.

Today is going to be a much better day for you and those around you–because you have the power to make it so.

What do you think?

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