Yup. I watched Oprah again.
In all fairness, a friend called to instruct me (catch that? this wasn’t a request) to watch today’s episode about slowing down. Apparently my frequent travels have a couple of folks concerned I’ll misplace my trail of bread crumbs and get lost in the woods.
But I digress.
Admittedly, I “watched” the show while working on the computer (these are billable hours, after all), but managed to focus on what was arguably the most important two minutes of the whole thing. Norman Fisher, Zen master and author of “Sailing Home,” offered terrific advice for the overwhelmed and overworked:
“How are we doing with our state of mind? How are we doing with our happiness? How are we doing with our attitude? We don’t think about this. We think about all the things we’ve got to be doing and all the ways we’ve got to be perfect, but every day we’ve got to wake up and say ‘How’s my state of mind today? Am I losing ground? If I am, I’d better address that first because the rest of the stuff I do won’t be worth anything if I’m harried and hassled and in a bad mood.’“And it has to do with telling yourself ‘I have got to take care of myself. I’ve got to make that a high priority.’”
Yes, that’s hard to do…especially if you’re trying to run a retail store while Wall Street telling you Main Street’s about to melt down. So what do you do to retain your grip on reality?
According to Fisher, you take 20 minutes…30 minutes…first thing in the morning. Get up before the kids, the spouse, or your normal alarm clock time. (Yes, losing the thirty minutes of sleep is a bummer, but not as big a bummer as dragging yourself through the day wanting to bite the heads off your customers, then spit them out on your employees.) According to Fisher, you should use the time
“…to breathe, to return to yourself, to digest yesterday’s emotions, to kind of take stock of yourself, and set yourself up for the day. Believe me, that amount of time [at the start of your day] saves you time during the course of your day.”
I buy it, partly because I’m pretty good about doing something similar to this. Took eight or nine years in the store to recognize boundaries weren’t going to prevent me from achieving goals, but were going to get me to them.
Try the twenty minutes thing, first thing in the morning, before you turn on the Today Show or say hello to your spouse. Slither out of bed, go to a quiet spot in the house where you can be completely alone, then breathe in. Breathe out. Take stock. And know you just invested in the best asset you have-—yourself.
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