When sudden changes come, help yourself through.
When sudden changes come, they have a way of upending everything. And they’re not always bad things — those changes.
Indeed, whether it’s an unexpected health crisis or winning the lottery when sudden changes come they throw you off track no matter what.
And the bigger the change, the bigger its impact.
Today I want to give you 5 tips to help you cope with this. You can’t change the changes that intrude on you, but you can do a lot to keep them from disrupting your time choices and totally disrupting your life.
So, without further ado, here are those tips…
When Sudden Changes Come: 5 Time Tips
1. Clarify your time choices and the priorities and values that drive them.
Reflect on ways you might remain in control of your time choices when sudden change disrupts your life. Big changes force your established priorities to take a back seat to the choices you must make in order to manage change. In quiet times you can plan and prepare for this.
2. Establish a habit of defining options.
To ensure your resilience when sudden changes come, identify priorities for your daily activities. The first priority you establish represents what you’d normally do. The second option reflects what you might do if you need to make changes.
3. Explore adjustments in your schedules that you can make quickly if you need to.
Sometimes making a daily to-do list and setting priorities goes beyond being a good habit and becomes an inflexible process. So, it’s helpful to introduce flexibility into your daily habits around time. You can do this by selecting one or two tasks that you need to accomplish each day. Give them a different priority or work on them at a different time than is your usual routine. Pay attention to how this feels and observe your reactions to these changes.
4. Re-examine your customary boundaries.
In times of change, even when it’s not sudden, your customary personal boundaries may have to shift. Take a few minutes and reflect on those you’ve worked hard to establish. Write them down so you are fully aware of the boundaries you have carefully put in place with family, friends, and coworkers. This keeps them from becoming unconscious, rigid assumptions. By remaining aware of your established boundaries, you are more easily able to adjust them if you need to.
5. Tell others about any sudden changes that affect your usual time choices.
When you’re dealing with changes, don’t keep this to yourself. Family, friends and coworkers can only understand and accept your need to realign priorities and redefine established boundaries if you alert them by sharing at least a brief description of what you’re dealing with.
Here’s more help:
I hope that you found these 5 tips helpful. How will you start using your time skills to plan for what sudden changes come? What step will you take, starting today?
Do you ever feel like change is coming at you too fast, or like it just arrives, uninvited, out of the blue?
I’ve recently been working with a client who was blind-sided by the sudden passing of a long-time co-worker. It’s turned her work life upside down and has also shaken her on a deep and personal level because this co-worker was the same age and also a good friend.
It’s brought up all kinds of big questions, on top of grief, and new work demands. The stresses and questions are piling up and she is feeling disoriented and anxious.
We’ve been working together on this for several weeks now. And today I shared a new time tool with her. I want to share it with you as well.
It’s titled How to Partner with Change and Aging. And to discover more about it right now, you can click here.
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