Every single day, there is one thing I always hope to have and never lose as the day progresses – my enthusiasm. The moment I wake up in the morning, I follow a daily routine that could set the enthusiastic mood up in me. I love to work, therefore, I am mostly happy and excited when I am doing tasks, from routine to unexpected. I have observed that I only feel exhausted when I am done with my tasks and my body and mind are at rest.
Tasks do not negatively affect my enthusiasm. They only make me become more energetic. However, when I receive bad news that affects me or get into a misunderstanding with other people, my mood goes down and in turn affects my entire day’s work. How? Here’s one example from the past.
One morning, I woke up early as usual and performed my daily morning routine with my team and valued clients. Naturally, this activity put me in high spirits. While having breakfast, I received an update from someone that she wouldn’t be able to fulfill her promise. It was a very important matter. I shared the news with my wife, who got disappointed and kind of lectured me about it. So the initially amicable conversation turned into an argument why I trusted the person without consulting her and so on. It ended in silencing each other the entire day. Although I continued with my tasks as usual, I noticed a difference in the way I worked that day. My enthusiasm to work swooped several notches down, and my thought process was not as smooth as it normally was. In addition, during my training that night, I was not at my 100%. I was not able to fully establish a connection with my participants. I wasn’t in a great mood and it showed. I wasn’t even capable of inserting jokes in my talk. Inadvertently, I infected other people, my tasks, and my entire day with my sour mood. Thus, I had that one bad day. In fact, I’ve had one too many of those bad days and some of them were caused by simple things that affected my mood.
My resolution to this personal challenge is to remind myself of the consequences when I get carried away by my emotions. I ask myself, should I allow this one thing to turn my whole day into a bad one? I have been reminded, time and time again, that we can’t control other people’s behavior or actions. What we can control is how we respond to the situation.
Do you agree?
(Photo by Inzmam Khan from Pexels)
by