Recognizing Patterns In Yourself

I had a really rough Tuesday. Well, not the whole day, just from about 2:37pm EST on. I was on an escalation call which occasionally comes with the territory of my 9-5, with a couple of internal colleagues and a couple folks from the customer side. A few minutes in someone on my team (think, head sales bro) who I don't normally work with decided to, more or less, throw me under the bus. I was completely caught off guard.

I can take criticism (most of the time 😜 ) but this was unwarranted, inaccurate and also made me out to look like an amateur. Something I am actively trying to move away from thanks to Steven Pressfield (see: Turning Pro). It pretty much ruined the rest of my day and it even bled into time with my family. Not. Cool.

So over the next couple of days I felt like I was in mole hitting mode, responding really quickly to both customer and internal requests with little thought put into my response. My fear of making a mistake or taking too long to respond to something has me over correcting. It's not not effective.

I remember a former manager, who had the coolest demeanor in hot situations, would pull me aside after similar customer scenarios where emotions ran a bit high. He knew how I would react and would look me in the eye, with his hands on my shoulders, and tell me to "slooooow dooooown". It always worked. So much so that I wrote those words down on a piece of paper, cut it to size, and taped it to my monitor as a reminder.

I think its important we all recognize as many of our own self defeating behaviors after something negative happens in our lives. Maybe even take a moment to journal on it, and do our best to course correct for the next time. We can all wish that things like that won't happen again, but they always do. In some form or fashion. Just remember that you can't control how others act, buy you can control your reaction. Like The Boss said...

hard times come and hard times go and
Hard times come and hard times go and
Hard times come and hard times go and
Hard times come and hard times go and
Hard times come and hard times go
Yeah, just to come again,