Overslept? Bring your compassion and flexibility to bear…
Flexibility and compassion are two keys to increasing your time management skills and meeting daily time challenges successfully. No matter how well you plan your time, there are bound to be glitches and bumps in the road. How you manage them defines your day, as surely as your plans do.
Consider this scenario — one that’s familiar to many of us:
You’ve overslept, not by a lot, but enough to throw off your plans for the morning.
You wake up slightly confused and disoriented, and a little bit panicky.
What do you do?
- The first thing you need to do is stop and take a breath. Your first impulse, when something like this happens, might be to jump out of bed and rush headlong into the day. While that’s understandable, all it will actually do is increase your stress and rob you of an opportunity to review and reset your time priorities. When you stop and take a breath, you are putting yourself back in charge of your time. This is very important, both psychologically and practically. When you pause like this, you put your feet solidly on the ground while you take stock. The decisions that follow will be founded in reality, rather than panic.
- Second, review at least the first part of your schedule. Do you have any appointments or time commitments? Take stock of whatever you have to do before your first, non-flexible, time commitment.
- What things can you let go of?
- Are there things that absolutely have to be done in the time you have left?
- What can you do later?
- Third, once you have rearranged your priorities and are ready to start your first task, pause again. This time, congratulate yourself for adjusting quickly and being flexible. It’s important to validate yourself for this, and really take it in. You don’t want to be starting your day with your inner critic on your shoulder, shaking her finger and berating you for oversleeping!
Don’t let your Inner Critic take over.
Something like oversleeping is not a moral shortcoming. This is where marshaling the energy of your compassion is so important. It opens you to creative possibilities that would otherwise be closed to you.
Oversleeping is one of those things that can happen to anyone from time to time. Approaching situations like this as problems to be solved or challenges to be overcome lets you bring your best energy to the task.
Berating yourself for a mistake will keep you stuck. Flexibility and compassion will get you moving again. And taking the additional step of validating yourself for your choices will have a positive impact on the rest of your day.
You can count on this.
Oversleeping is a good time management glitch to start with for thinking about the energy you bring to your time challenges.
Enlisting compassion and flexibility will help you make practical choices that let you stay on track with your daily priorities.
How do you handle your time challenges now? Are there things you’d like to change? I’d love to hear.
And here’s more help for you…
We all have voices that chatter at us throughout the day. The Inner Critic is one of them. Learning to recognize (and counter) this destructive voice is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
You see, the Inner Critic is a negative, debilitating and constant presence in your life. And it’s not just the words! It’s the judgmental tone, the rolling eyes, and the scolding wag of the index finger.
Beyond sapping your energy and confidence, your Inner Critic robs you of time and profoundly distorts how you see others and how you feel about yourself. So, what can you do?
Give yourself a big boost with my Exercise and Guide Book titled “These Critical Voices Are Driving Me Crazy!” How to Use Positive Self-Talk to Save Your Sanity and Your Time! This book offers simple, practical exercises, checklists and tips for learning to recognize and counter the critical voices that disrupt and hurt you.
“This guidebook is by a secret genius as far as I’m concerned.
Her name is Paula Eder and she is absolutely brilliant
when it comes to how to be in relationship with self and
how to be in relationship with time.”
Heather Dominick http://BusinessMiracles.com/
You hold the power to make conscious choices about the kinds of messages you give yourself. As you exercise this power, you’ll develop new clarity and confidence – and transform your time.
“These Critical Voices Are Driving Me Crazy!” opens the door and gives you a roadmap, so don’t wait. Click this link to get started on your empowering journey today!
Let’s explore time together…
Speak Your Mind