#19 When You Start To Lose Control—Stop, Breathe And Regain Focus
May 17, 2008
Being overwhelmed and feeling out of control in your business is a terrible feeling. Sometimes you just don’t know where to turn. There are hundreds of emails that need answering, a pile of telephone messages to return, correspondence to read, meetings to be had, deadlines of every kind, staff needing direction-and then you get the call saying there is a problem with your biggest customer, and it’s a doozy.
If all this sounds like your normal kind of day-and it’s only 9 a.m.-no wonder you are feeling a little out of control and in need of some balance and harmony in your life. I can relate completely. When you are in the midst of an overwhelming downer, it’s easy to slide even lower. Taking a moment to rethink and regroup is the best thing you can possibly do here.
A friend of mine who is a pilot said that this is one of the key training techniques used in flight school. When things are starting to go pear-shaped, simply take a moment to stop everything, take a big, deep breath and think logically about what you are doing. Sounds simple, doesn’t it, but we rarely do it.
A good friend of mine who has had the pleasure of watching me over the years going from periods of Zen monk calmness to sheer madness gave me a sticker that simply said ‘JUST BREATHE’. And it is advice I will take to the grave.
Years ago I had problems with anxiety attacks. I was a commercial diver at the time so, as you can imagine, it’s not good to experience a panic attack 50 metres below the surface. The psychologist said a similar thing at the time: ‘You have to learn to breathe.’ At the time I was not very impressed by these words of wisdom, thinking I had clearly just wasted hundreds of dollars seeing a crazy woman, but as the years went by and I did learn to breathe, I realised just how right she was.
When we are stressed and freaked out we breathe very shallowly. This makes us feel short of breath and even more stressed, which of course stresses us out even further. It’s a nasty cycle.
If you can learn to stop, take a few very deep breaths and then do what you need to do, the results will be far better and your feelings of being out of control will be greatly reduced in intensity. It is simply a matter of reprogramming your normal response mechanism, which is to dive in and try to fix everything at once.
What can I do today?
Learn to breathe. Put a big sign on the wall: ‘JUST BREATHE’. And the very next time you are feeling the pangs of being ‘out of control’ starting to surface, stop, take a few deep breaths and then act. It will take a while to reprogram yourself, but when you’ve done it, life will become much easier.
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By N2H
