Under the Gun

Monday morning, 9am and you realize that you've already double booked an appointment, lost the directions to a sales call, or prepared notes for next week's presentation instead of this week's. Bonus points if you have realized all three things at once. Being under the gun, behind the eight ball, dropping the ball...we've all had those moments. Our sense of organization suddenly crumbles. How we react next will determine if we can pull ourselves out of the spin or or simply continue to stumble forward in a series of bad-timing dominos.

For most of us (myself included), the knee-jerk reaction is try to speed up to make up for our time-draining error: we drive a bit faster to the meeting, cut corners on the report that needs writing and skip lunch all in hopes that at the end of the day we have somehow ended up back on track. More often that not, however, we end up with a speeding ticket, a report that needs to be rewritten and 3pm fatigue that strikes us comatose. Now, instead finding our groove again, we are farther behind that we were before.

Instead, try what might go against your every impulse: stop. Stop for 5, 10 or even 20 minutes to assess what might be the issue, fix the issue if it is easily fixable, then forgive yourself and let it go. This happened to me the other day when I realized that maintaning two calendars created the perfect double booking storm. Not being able to be in two places at once instantly created stress and anxiety. Some parts of that problems were easily solved; other parts of the problem will require more than 15 minutes of my attention. I did what I could do in that brief amount of time. The harder thing to do was give myself some grace and let the mistake go. How did I finally convince myself to do this? Simple. I reminded myself that self-flagalation (stewing, reprimanding, overzealous apologizing) takes time...something that I didn't have a lot of at the present moment. Letting go of the mistake in that moment involved allowing myself to sit in my car for 2 extra minutes to feel myself return to center. I was able to go forward with the day clear headed and aware of what I needed to do to prevent that mistake from happening again. Moving on ended up creating more space instead of depleating it.