Hey! It's you! Wow, you're looking good! Welcome back and welcome to 2015!!
I really hope your Christmas and New Year celebrations (if you had them) were everything you wanted them to be, whether it was partying like a rock star, doing cartwheels on a main street or curled up on a couch watching a movie.
So we're a few weeks into 2015 now, perhaps you're still trucking along with your New Year's Resolution or perhaps it's become but a distant memory. Or maybe you long ago decided you're way too old for that kind of palaver (note I wrote palaver just then, not Pavlova, you're never too old for Pavlova).
Whatever the case, I'm hoping that this coming year is going to be way better for you than 2014.
I'm planning on mine being awesome, perhaps legendary.
But how can you set yourself up for likelihood of success rather than inviting in potential failure?
Well, as always with these crazy posts I put together for you, the answer is again surprisingly simple, hence why I thought the first post for the New Year should really focus around;
"Start out how you intend to finish"
Yes, I heard you sigh, but hold up; it's not as laborious of a statement as you might think. They are wise old words and if you can open your mind a little bit, you might just have one of those light bulb moments that could change your 2015 for the better.
So the obvious question you have to ask has to be;
I'm kidding :) Read on and I'll do my best to explain.
Starting out how you intend to finish is really just a mind-set, it's an attitude adjustment to put you in the ring with the best possible fighting chance.
Stress is one of those things that can knock you out, kick you when you're down and generally wail on you when you're running out of gas. It's one of those things that can take the toughest of us out without much of a problem. If you let it, it can be like the Hulk, but bigger and angrier and wanting you pasted.
So, to start out as you mean to finish?
Make 2015 the year you take pro-active steps to learn how to defend yourself from it. Like every fight, know that you're never going to come out unscathed, but know that a little bit of stress is actually good for you, even long term. But again, it depends on where YOU let your stress get to.
Take this fighting analogy a wee bit further. In the ring, would you let someone swing for your face in the exact same manner after they hit you the first time? No, you would see it coming and move out of the way, right?
What about getting hit a second time in the stomach after the exact same wind-up? No to that too, I'm guessing. If you see a pattern in movement, you can avoid the result and take appropriate action.
So then outside of the ring in your normal life, consider these few statements…
- You hang with people who every time you see them, deliberately make you uncomfortable or feel like a loser
- You have a fair-weather friend – a person who remains friendly with you only as long as you don't do better than them – but things are just beginning to improve for you and they're starting to turn everyone against you
- You hang with people you know are constantly lying to you, yet you keep them in your life
- You do the same thing over and over and over, the exact same way but you keep expecting a vastly different result
My question for you is this - how are these examples any different from being in the ring and dodging or moving out of the way of punches or kicks you can see coming?
Simple answer – they aren't. They're the same. Each will end up with you feeling stressed or injured if you don't choose to take action.
To start out as you mean to finish, the time has arrived for you to take the control over your own life and to see the patterns you keep falling into that keep giving you the negative stress.
It's time to find a way to make things work for you and give yourself the best chance for success.
In the interests of helping with a work thing, let's take the stress of emails for instance.
If your outlook inbox is as crazy as mine with 200 something emails firing in per day, then simply managing this volume can be a stressful task all on its own.
So how do I manage it? Quite some time ago I set up a [insert word that sounds like "hit" but starts with an "s") load of email rules so that Outlook manages a great deal of the emails for me. It saves me time, stress, gives me the ability to find emails quickly and keeps me on top of most things.
(For help on this, see: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-email-messages-by-using-rules-50307363-0e79-4f6a-95c0-04b922a2ff13?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US )
Why work harder, right? Why would you do it any other way?
So this post is really just an "open your eyes to the possibilities" kinda post, telling you that YOU have the ability to sort pretty much any issue that might come your way.
It is simply a case of how you decide to act and the attitude you decide to have at any given time.
Will you let those same punches keep coming, or will you evade the obvious and fight back by being smart about it?
So like I've said a few times now...the same adage still applies.
"Those who go looking for trouble are never a problem for those who are ready for them"
Start out as you mean to finish, my friend.
Ding ding.
You're up.
