Dealing with a bad day

We all have them: A client strings you along and then drops a project he or she promised. You do a lot of work on a project and then the higher-ups decide to go a different direction, etc. It's enough to make a self-employed person tear her hair out.

The key is a few things:

1. Adapt the mantra: It's not personal.

It can feel very personal: It effects your work, sometimes it effects your wallet and often it effects your serenity. The only way to make it worse on yourself if you take that moment and use it to feed your monkey mind, the part of you that's always looking for a place to stash your most corrosive negative thoughts.

Now, of course it's normal for it to feel personal, but take good care of yourself by not wallowing in that thought. Every time it comes up again as a personal attack on you or your business, just repeat the mantra: "It's not personal."

2. Check in with yourself.

When I have a bad day, sometimes I'm not capable of checking in with myself until the end of the day, by which time I am so worked up and so reactionary that I'm no fun to be with, even for me. My brain is not a safe place to be in those instances.

The venerable yogi B.K.S. Iyengar in his seminal modern yoga book Light On Yoga writes about his two kinds of anger:

There are two types of anger (krodha), on of which debases the mind while the other leads to spiritual growth. The root of the first is pride, which makes one angry when slighted. The prevents the mind from seeing things in perspective and makes one's judgment defective. The yogi, on the other hand, is angry with himself when his mind stoops low or when all his learning an experience fail to stop him from folly. He is stern with himself when he deals with his own faults, but gentle witht eh faults of others. Gentleness of mind is an attribute of a yoga, whose heart melts at all suffering. In him gentleness for others and firmness for himself goes hand in hand, and in his presence all hostilities are given up.

Sound like a tall order?

It is, if you try to simply will yourself into that state of mind. I'm sure there are many ways of getting to that kind of clarity: prayer, yoga, meditation, etc. But one of the ways that work for me, because I'm a writer, is to write it all down.

The key in Mr. Iyengar's concept of yogic response to anger seems to me to be a few things:

* When you're reacting to others our of pride (i.e., taking things personally) you aren't seeing clearly. So any business decisions you make in the face of such a reactive mind are bound to need correcting later--and bound to send your serenity ricocheting all over the room.

* The yogi's heart "melts at all suffering." What that means to me is that it melts at *your* suffering as well. So his charge to you, I believe, is to find a way to be "firm" with yourself/take responsibility for your part without subjecting yourself to suffering. If you're prone to perfectionism, it's easy to take this edict as a sign that you need to beat yourself up. That's not yogic in my mind because it's full of pride. It's all about you.

So how do you separate pride from firmness? Write it all down: Your fears, your resentments, your beliefs about yourself, and what you can learn from the situation.

Then just sit with it for a bit. The thing about having a bad day is that you can't right it in an hour--at least not in my experience. If something rocks your core or your bottom line, it's going to take time to go through the feelings and feel steady again. Let it be, and continue to work on the work in front of you.

3. Reach out for support.

I write a lot about support in this blog--for good reason. There's nothing worse than gritting your teeth through a bad day and then vomitting all your fear and anxiety and resentments all over your mate when he or she returns home.

We've all been guilty of this, but here's a promise: You don't have to wait till the end of the day to get the support you need. If you set up a system of people who support the sane and serene operation of your business, you can call through that roster until you start to feel a little better. That way, if your partner gets home and he or she had had a bad day, too, you aren't adding to your own or anyone else's stress by forcing that person to be everything for you.

One warning about support, though: It's important to clear out what's your side of the street and what's out of your control before you pick up the phone. Otherwise, you run the risk of simply ramping yourself up and feeling more anxious, fearful and caught by the monkey mind.

Serenity Tip: Setting Priorities

The other day, a dear friend called feeling overwhelmed by all the things in front of her to do in the next three hours. In her jumbled mind, so filled was it with self-blame for not having gotten more done sooner that her tasks spread out in front of her infinitely. She couldn't fathom getting everything done, let alone getting that magic amount done: "Enough."

Time management is a complicated skill, and there are a million people out there ready to tell you how to do it. Like everything else, though, finding the tool that works for you depends on cherry-picking, to some extent.

Here are a few of the things that work for me: Perhaps they will work for you.

Write it down

In Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, author David Allen really encourages people to write stuff down. Until you do, you'll feel like my friend: stressed because you're trying to manage all those tasks in your head, instead of on paper, where they metamorphize into discrete and manageable tasks.

So with my friend, I asked her for each thing she needed to do, when they were due, and how long she estimated they would take.

I listed these out.

Prioritize

I love my Franklin Covey planner, mostly for the little to-do list it includes on each day. But the real brilliance of the Franklin Covey plan is its encouragement to divide things into three categories:

A-- essential; must get done today or the world ends.
B-- important but not essential.
C-- optional.

With my friend, I think asked her to rank each item--it turned out there were only five items, and only two turned out to be essential.

Then, Franklin Covey recommends numbering each item, according to when you'll do them, not how important they are. My to-do list usually starts this way:

A1: Written check in
A2: Meditate
A3: Call one of my support people
B4: Marketing. Sure, you could consider this "essential," as any business will die without it. But unless I'm plumb out of work, I consider this to be an important thing to do no matter what.

And then I get to the work that's attached to an actual paycheck.

Your "essential" items are probably different from yours. This is just what works for me.

After my friend and I talked for a bit about her work, she was able to differentiate between the things she felt like she had to do because otherwise she'd be embarassed and the things that were actually essential for meeting deadlines.

And that frantic anxiety abated.

Give it a try. Or even better: tell me what prioritization system works best for you.

Serenity Tip: Knowing Your Value

Not long ago, I wrote about transfering your creative skills to your business life. But here's another good reason to cultivate your skills:

Better negotiation

The first thing Erik Sherman will tell you about negotiation is to remember the value you bring to any project. If you're a perfectionist or simply prone to negative thinking, that's not just the first step but the most important one. Here's what I mean:

When a client contacts you to do work, do you negotiate pay?
Do you know what your hourly rate should be?
Do you believe you deserve it?

I know many freelance writers who don't value their own skills enough--or at least struggle to value their own skills enough--to ask for the money they need to make their career sustainable. They may have a business plan. They may even know how much they need to earn per billable hour to make their minimum income. But without the belief that their skills matter and that they are offering something of value to their clients, they constantly feel like their clients are doing them a favor by hiring them. Without that sense of value, they can't put the rest of their plan into action.

So don't skip this step. If you're particularly prone to focusing on the parts of your work that aren't good enough, make a list of your skills, and the good things editors say about you and put it behind your computer monitor or on the wall in front of where you look most often (obviously, this should be out of view of your clients).

To help, here are some questions to ask yourself:

* What compliments do you get most often from clients?
* What skills have you fought hard to develop?
* What do you like most about your work and what energizes you?
* Are you good with deadlines?
* Do you return calls quickly?
* Are you professional--do you fess up to errors, do you double check facts, do you respond quickly to edits (if you're a writer)?
* Are you always looking for ways to improve your work? (This is a twist on "negative thinking:" if you are focused on what you didn't do perfectly the last time, you're also focusing on changing it. You don't make the same mistake twice or three times.)

These may seem like small things to you but they are of great value to your clients--and they often make the difference between hiring you and another writer. You become the go-to contractor for clients by having these skills.

So the next time you go to negotiate your price, remember the value you provide and ask for what you deserve.

Quick Escapes at Your Computer

If you're fried and procrastinating it could be your brain's plea for a break. So don't just visit snarky Web sites or engage in gossip. Instead, there are some great quick-break meditation sites on the web that can get you to real relaxation and help you get productive again:

The Meditation Room

This site offers two great things: Instructions on how to meditate and also guided meditations via RealPlayer Audio. The only bummer is that if you have a Mac, you won't be able to hear them. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Relaxing Image Meditation

I know it sounds like snake oil to say that looking at pretty pictures is anything other than, well, pretty. But research shows that guided imagery can reduce stress, anxiety and depression, as well as blood pressure. This site offers a slideshow of pretty pictures combined with tips on meditation.

Guided Relaxation Audio Files for Anxiety

This site, run by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Health Services is a treasure trove of both information for identifying and relieving anxiety and of guided audio files on learning relaxation breathing exercises. These come in both RealAudio files and Mac-compatible MP3 downloads and are only a few minutes long. So squeeze them in between appointments.

Deep Breathing Relaxation Audio Sessions

The University of Wisconsin Madison University Health Center offers 18 different short audio files for deep breathing relaxation. Titles like "breath awareness," "peaceful focus" and "brief muscle relaxation" are supported by voice-over explanations or you can choose fils with only harp or nature sounds to support your relaxation. But maybe avoid the "sleep technique" file until bedtime. You don't want to drift off before that big phone call with a new client.

YouTube

I know. The same site full of snowboarding wipeouts and Asian kids lip syncing to the Backstreet Boys also has a slew of guided imagery and guided meditation videos that can give you a nice break in your day.

Serenity Tip: Gentleness

On this blog I offer a lot of techniques and tips for staying serene on the job. But I would hate for anyone to use this blog as a means to beat yourself up. You don't have to track your time, do a mid-day check-in every day, finish your business plan today, or do yoga and meditate every day.

These are all good things, sure, but too much too fast guarantees you won't keep any of it up for very long. And if theres one thing serenity isn't, it's attempting to be perfect by doing everything and then beating yourself up for not being serene.

So if you're feeling overwhelmed or inadequate, follow the suggestion of a friend of mine: "Take what you like and leave the rest."

Basically, like any toolbox, these tips can be picked up any time you need them. You don't need to do them all day every day. And if one really works for you but you fall off the wagon with it, that's okay. Just become aware and when you're ready, you'll pick it up again.

Take good care of yourself today--whatever that looks like. And remember that however much of a workaholic you are with bad boundaries and all the rest, it took you years to get that way. You aren't going to let go of those habits overnight, and you don't have to. To make a change to a more serene life, what you have to do is just keep trying. Eventually, it'll take.

Serenity Tip: Facing Procrastination

We've all done it: We've cruised around our favorite message boards and silly Web sites, organized our desk, done laundry--anything but the task in front of us.

And then, if you're the least bit conscientious, you spend another few hours beating yourself for your lost productivity. Obviously, this can kill your serenity, and become an endless cycle.

So my gentle nudge of the day is to embrace your procrastination.

There are a few reasons to do this: First, if you're in a creative field, chances are your procrastination is part of your process. I have to constantly remind myself can also be another way of saying that I'm working out fine points or organizing thoughts subconsciously. It'll pass.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, if you don't accept it, your resistance will be worse than the procrastination itself.

So how do you get comfortable with it--and then overcome it? Start by getting to know why you're resisting in the first place. What's the fear? What's the anxiety?

Face it. And then assess what's realistic. It may also help to track your time to see what's taking you the longest and how you're really spending your time. You may find that what feels like procrastination to you is actually a reasonable amount of time to spend taking care of other, important items, like your spirituality or admin work.

If you find you still can't get yourself to work, procrastination might be a serious problem for you. In that case, consider these tips care of Procrastinators Anonymous:

Break It Down: Break down projects into specific action steps; include preparation tasks in the breakdown.

Visualization: Plan what to do, then imagine yourself doing it. The more specific and vivid your visualization, the better. See yourself doing the task, and doing it well.

Focus on Long-Term Consequences: Procrastinators have a tendency to focus on short-term pleasure, and shut out awareness of long-term consequences. Remind yourself how panicked and awful you'll feel if the task isn't done, then imagine how good it will feel when the task is finished.

Avoid Time Bingeing: One reason procrastinators dread starting is that once they start they don't let themselves stop. Plan to work on a task for a defined period of time, then set a timer. When the timer goes off, you're done.

Use Small Blocks of Time: Procrastinators often have trouble doing tasks in incremental steps, and wait for big blocks of time that never come. When you have small blocks of time, use them to work on the task at hand.

Avoid Perfectionism: Procrastinators have a tendency to spend more time on a task than it warrants, so tasks that should be quick to do take an agonizingly long time. Notice this tendency and stop yourself. Some things require completion, not perfection.

Develop Routines: To help structure your day and make a habit of things you always need to do, develop routines for what you do when you wake up, regular tasks of your workday, and what you need to do before going to bed.

Bookend Tasks and Time: Use the Bookending board on the P.A. Web site to check in throughout the day, or at the beginning or end of specific tasks you are dreading.

Serenity Tip: The Mid-Day Check-In

If you're anything like me, you power through your days, clicking through the items on your to-do list until you retire at night with a jumbled brain. Meditation helps with this, of course. But a friend constantly reminds me that I have another option. Now I'll pass that option on to you:

The Mid-Day Check-In

When you hit Frazzled on your daily stress meter, stop what you're doing. Move away from the computer or the office. Sit somewhere quiet (if possible) and get out a pad and a pen. Then make a list of the following:

* What you resent and why (this can be people--including you--and they don't have to be rational).
* What you're afraid of (those nagging fears that get louder in your head the more you ignore them? Write them down.)
* What things are out of your control (I call this my acceptance list--as in, "I accept that I'm powerless over the future and worrying about it won't change it.")
* What you're grateful for at this moment (it might be having a minute to think, or maybe you just landed a big fish client or maybe you're grateful for the flexibility of your self-employed life.)

Whatever those things are, write them down. Then take a minute to breath deep and imagine each one dropping into the ether.

After taking that break, you may find you're more centered and more ready to tackle the next thing on your list with compassion and poise.