From a reader… “I’ve gotten pretty good at staying grounded when things are normal, but when something goes wrong, I sometimes get caught up in wishing I had done or said something differently. I end up playing it over and over, wasting time and energy on what I can’t change.”
It’s pretty human to get caught in some would have, should have when things don’t seem to be going our way. Three things I do to move through it:
1. I remind myself of Kurt Yaeger’s message about his lemons t-shirt…that life gave him lemons and he’s made lemonade, lemon tarts, lemon pie.
2. I watch Randy Pausch’s video again and ask myself if he had one more day would he waste it worrying about what he couldn’t change?
3. I get coaching and support to get clear on any lessons I can learn.
And then I get down to the business of turning the what went wrong into an opportunity. I faced this exact situation when a teleclass I was scheduled to do for twelve inspiring women from Anne Day’s Oakville, Ontario based group “A Company of Women.” Even though I had checked with my conference calling company to make sure calls from Canada were okay, I learned the hard way that my call in number was one of two area codes some Canadian carriers deny.
I had one person on the line and a chance to either reschedule it or make the best of it. She’d made the effort to show up, therefore so did I. We proceeded, recorded it and I created a new offer to the women who missed it. They’ll be listening to the recording and then we’ll do a follow up teleclass where they can design some plans to put into action based on what they learned from the recorded class. It will be more interactive and action-oriented now that we built the foundation of concepts and tools.
After the call, I asked myself how was I cause in the matter. Not as a way of beating myself up but to look for the learning. Taking responsibility empowered me and gave me a few action steps to follow for next time. I didn’t have the line tested from Canada. And I didn’t have a backup line. So guess what I’ll be doing before our makeup teleclass call?
Begin to look for opportunities in the moments that feel like mistakes, problems or things that have gone wrong. Turn lemons into lemonade. If Kurt can do it, we can too!
