Sometimes, the world spins wildly out of your control, and you forget you have control of your life. Here are ten things you can take charge of right now. Pick two.
Anything can turn to shit at any time.
Minor things: sick kids, traffic jams, and car repairs. Major things: PR nightmares, natural disasters, and pandemics.
It doesn’t matter how well you plan, or how much you prepare, something’s going to throw you off course. When you run too close to the edge - financially, emotionally, physically or logistically - even minor things can be a nightmare. You need a buffer.
Your buffer might have taken a hit in the last little while. Funds are down, energy is low, and pressure is up. You might have used all of it up, and you’re already in the red.
But you don’t have to run dry. Make a choice now, determine your deficits, and rebuild some space and margin in your life: an extra month’s expenses, a few hours a week of nothing time, an extra hour’s sleep each night.
I adore the Nietzsche phrase: amor fati. It's a Latin term that loosely translates to ‘a love of one’s fate.’
Nothing is inherently positive or negative. It just… is. Whether we like it or not, there’s a lot in our lives we can’t control.
When I work with leaders who are deep in the shit, I often ask them to try writing five or ten different news headlines to describe different angles on what’s just happened. The pin usually drops around the third or fourth headline - the story is up to you. You can’t control what’s happened, but you can choose how to think about it.
Your current crisis is just a blip on the radar of your life.
You’re playing a long game, and people who are serious about their long game all have one thing in common: clear intention.
They might not know what’s coming or how they will make their intention a reality, but they know what they aim for. They hold it lightly, but take it seriously.
Strong intentions, held lightly, act as a guide and filter for your decisions. They open up possibilities you wouldn’t see otherwise and open your eyes to options others might miss.
The stuff we commit to but don’t get done doesn’t go away. It festers in your consciousness and weighs you down, making it hard to be great at the stuff you are doing.
If just reading that paragraph makes you uneasy, it’s time to tackle that backlog. You can’t work with what you can’t see, so make it visible.
Make the list, make a plan, and start checking it off. Set a day aside and kill it. Make the calls, book and order things, organise a tradesperson, hire that person, fire that other one, drop that broken thing in for repair. Once you get a roll on, it’s astonishing how quickly it all goes away.
When I do strategy work, teams often tell me, “This won’t need any extra budget, just time,” or “I don’t think we need to take anything away to make room for this.”
Where do you think you’re getting extra time from? Can you bend the space-time continuum? No. No, you can’t.
You’ve got 24 hours in a day. 168 hours in a week. How do you want to spend them? What’s your ideal split between work, family, friends and personal time? How much time should be spent on exercise? How much should go on your most important projects? It’s up to you.
Get some clarity about your spread, and organise your life to suit.
I’ve had kids for most of my life, and the one myth I had to bust quickly was my vision of the calm, patient Earth Mother I thought I would be. I thought the patience came with the kid, and I’m unsure whether mine had missing accessories, but… it didn’t. I'm 19 years into this gig and I’m still working on it.
Trying to change everyone around you is an exhausting and unwinnable battle. Your kids are always going to act up. There will always be someone at work who makes your life hard. You’re always going to have to interact with frustration, distraction and general fuckery - so get better at it.
Meditate, get therapy, exercise, write down your frustrations, learn to take deep breaths, and cancel your stress. Working on your tolerance is a winnable battle.
If your screen time is more than two hours a day, get your shit together. You're an adult.
Leave the phone out of your bedroom, turn it off when you're with people you care about, and take your life back. You aren't so important that you must be contactable and responsive for more than a couple of hours each day. What are you doing, saving the world?
You have plenty of time to read, paint, renovate, call your family, make nice meals, and exercise, but you have forgotten it isn't normal to spend hours gazing at screens of varying sizes like a slack-jawed zombie.
You need the right people around you - staff, team, mates, and mentors. Life is hard enough without doing it alone. You deserve help, support, and fun - and you can have it.
You might not know who, and you might not even know how, but it’s important to be clear about the capabilities you need around you. At home, work out the support you need and ask for it.
Review your team for gaps and issues at work and tackle them. In your personal life, think about who needs to be on your personal board of directors and recruit. Join a walking group or a book club.
Your home is your sanctuary, so make it a place you love to be.
Buy great sheets - that’s half the hotel bill anyway. Get into the garden. Sort out your maintenance. Light a scented candle. Clean out your garage. Water your houseplants. Cultivate love, respect and care for your safe place, and enjoy returning to it daily.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, is more important than your health.
Most of us will happily hand over thousands to fix our car, or maintain our home, but wince at the cost of a trainer, surgery or dentist bill. Stop it.
Take inventory of your mental, emotional and physical health. Book in a few months of therapy. Make daily exercise a priority. Change what you put in your mouth. Get that mole checked. Go to the dentist. Commit to a sleep schedule. Drink some water. Did I mention sleep? Go to sleep.