You Can Start Your Workday Over Anytime
No matter what happens throughout a workday, we always have the ability to choose to start our day over anytime, and as many times as we want.
In this episode, we’ll discuss how easy it is to fall into the trap of labeling a workday as “bad”, and how we can start our day over simply by adjusting our mindset.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
No matter what happens throughout a workday, we always have the ability to choose to start our day over anytime, and as many times as we want. Let’s talk about how to do it.
Main: If someone asks us at the end of our workday how it went, we’re likely to put it into one of two categories: a good day or a bad day.
And the reason we assign a single outcome to an entire day is because it’s natural to view workdays as singular units - we measure time in days, and there’s a natural start point and end point to a workday, so thinking about it in this way makes sense.
And because we think about days as singular units, we also have the tendency to fall into the trap of thinking about our days in terms of all or nothings.
Think about how often something doesn’t go your way at the beginning of the day and you end up letting that one thing define the rest of your day.
That single thing can end up putting you on a path that seems irreversible, which leads to immediately chalking up the entire day as a bad day - regardless of what happens the rest of the day.
But it turns out that you actually have the ability to start your workday over anytime you want.
No matter what happens during the day, you always have the ability to shift your mindset and choose how you want to perceive what’s happened.
You can decide to look at it in a positive light, you can make peace with it, or you can just leave it behind you and move on.
You can decide to leave emotions and feelings and limiting thoughts that don’t suit you in the past, and you can choose to move forward with a mentality that aligns with how you want to experience the rest of your day.
So to give you some context for this I’ll share with you how this has played out in my worklife. A few years ago I founded a tech company called DueCourse and before that I was an associate in a major US law firm and also had my own law firm for a few years where I represented fitness and health and wellness statups. And in each of those working situations like many people I found myself confronted with situations that were out of my control that would pop up during a workday. And over time I realized that my mood and my mindset during the day were chained to external things that were happening around me.
So things like what someone would say to me in person, emails that I got, a potential client who said no to working with us, setbacks in the business, things that were moving too slowly, or anything else that got me thinking negatively - I realized the way I was thinking about my day moment to moment was wrapped up in all of these external situations.
And I also realized that I was being a passive participant in letting these thoughts control me. Even though I knew that a certain situation like a tough call or a negative interaction made me think a certain way, I wasn’t doing anything to process what had happened and move on.
But then I had this realization that no matter what that external situation was, I literally had the ability to perceive that situation in any way that I chose. So instead of internalizing something and letting it control me, I realized that if I had enough awareness to know that it was controlling me then I could catch that thought and change what happened next.
And as I put this into practice over time, I’ve decided at 3:30 or even 4 o’clock in the afternoon on some days that I want to start my day over, because I don’t want what’s left of my day to be defined by one thing or a series of things that happened earlier in the day.
So how can you put this into practice? The best way to start practicing this is when you catch yourself in the middle of situations or thoughts that aren’t helping you, what you do is literally envision yourself restarting your day.
Physically get up from your workspace, get a glass of water or a cup of coffee, or take a quick walk, and then re-enter your workspace with the intention of starting fresh. Go through whatever routine it is that you use to start your day and replicate that routine. And when you act as if you are literally starting your day over, that will trigger your brain to have a fresh start.
It turns out that our brains are actually very good at following directions like this as long as we set an intention that we want to start over.
So of course this isn’t a fix all and it may not completely get rid of your earlier experience, but at the very least what it does is give you some separation from that part of your day so that you can get to moving on.
So the next time you catch yourself experiencing thoughts that aren’t suiting you, remember that you can always start your day over - and you can do it as many times as you want.
Go have a great workday.