Don’t be a victim of allowing one bad experience to affect the rest of your day. Rather than forging ahead, you feel there’s no chance of doing anything else productive for the remainder of the day. The problem is, you actually believe this.
Regardless of what you do, whether you’re a manager, telemarketer, salesperson or business owner, remember:
- One bad call doesn’t make a bad day,
- One bad day doesn’t make a bad week,
- One bad week doesn’t make a bad month,
- One bad month doesn’t make a bad year.
While you may find that one or two of these beliefs resemble some of your diversionary tactics, this is actually good news!
Yes, you have some, we all do; and if you don’t think so, then consider that the very fact you deny or resist having on is, in fact, your diversionary tactic, or what I like to call, perfectionism, and that’s speaking as a recovering perfectionist.
Hey, I never said that you would actually like bringing this truth to the surface. Who does? After all, it takes a lot of courage to look in the mirror and be fully honest with yourself. However, now that you have a greater understanding, awareness and most important, ownership, you can do something about it. And that’s going to typically be in the face of adversity or when handling a timely and reactionary problem.
Don’t Succumb to Drama
When you notice yourself falling into this trap, you can then exercise the greatest power that we as human beings possess. The power of choice. Don’t succumb to drama. Whatever it was that happened during a typical day at work; whatever problem you’re faced with or what you may consider to be a failure or your inability to generate the result you want, ask yourself these eight questions to move yourself out of your own way.
- What happened?
- Why did this happen?
- What’s the worst thing that could happen from here?
- What’s the best thing that could happen?
- How can I turn this around to focus on what I want to happen most?
- What am I doing to move ahead?
- What did I learn?
- Now, let’s move on.
So, you can make the choice to either continue engaging in a diversionary tactic and invest way too much negative, emotional energy into a problem or make a better choice that will generate the results you really want.
Photo Credit: Derek Bruff
