I AM TIRED

“All of a sudden I felt really tired.  Like the world has drained me for everything that I had.” – via (Quotes ‘nd Notes)

I am tired.  I have had three cups of coffee on this Saturday morning, and I am still tired. The amazing team of sales managers and sales directors that I have the pleasure of working with are all tired too.  To be honest, I think the whole working world is exhausted.  After 2 years of living through a pandemic, fighting for our health and our emotional wellbeing.  We now find ourselves struggling to survive in a world of non-stop supply challenges, employee shortages, cost cutting and inflation pressures.  I have been on many emotional phone calls recently.  Colleagues and employees exhausted by their inability to control an outcome, frustrated by what they see as a lack of effort on others behalf to get things done.

When I am tired, I quickly go from frustrated to emotional.  It is the easiest path to take along the road of feelings.  It has taken me years to realize that adding emotions to my frustrations very rarely benefits me or my career.  In a challenging work environment, the very best and first thing you can do is to separate the frustration from the emotional reaction.  This effort takes practice and determination.  It takes a self-recognition of your feelings in that moment and the ability to pull them out of your body and place them on the side table.  By pulling out the emotion, I am in a clearer and healthier place to address the challenge in front of me.  I can then go back later and deal with the emotion in a much more productive manner.  For example, screaming into a pillow.

I have not spoken to anyone with a career lately that is having an easy time.  My teaching friends speak of young kids that have been behind computer screens and shut in their bedrooms for nearly 2 years.  These children have lost essential learning. Their social and coping skills have become nearly non-existent.  The whole world is tired….

So what now?  What can you do when your frustrations partner up with your emotions and you find yourself off on a wildly unproductive ride?  First and foremost, STOP; consider the problem and remove the emotion.  The best advice I have found in this mission is as follows:

“Let go of what you can’t control but empower yourself to affect change by focusing on the things you can do.”

If necessary, make a list.  List out your feelings and emotions on a sheet of paper and put that in an envelope or physically place it on a side table; then write out the problem or the challenge at the top of a clean page.  In the left-hand column, write out what you CANNOT CONTROL.  In the right-hand column, make a list of what YOU CAN DO and CAN CONTROL. Then do that!

I am tired, you are tired, the whole world is tired.  Take some time to rest my friend, you can at least control that.