When was your last bad day? Or maybe I should ask instead, when was your last good day?
Bad days are the worst. There are enough songs about them to make a whole playlist. There are books and movies devoted to those horrible days when every possible thing goes wrong. We’ve all had them, some more than most.
If bad days get you down too often, my question for you is, why are they happening in the first place? This might be a dose of tough love, but honestly, sometimes we can be our own worst enemies. As much as we’d like to think that the Universe is against us, we’re cursed, it could happen to anyone…the truth is that we set ourselves up for failure.
Are you planting the seeds today for a huge harvest of miserable bad days in the future? How many of these “random” occurrences of “bad luck” can actually be traced back to their source, only to find out you set them in motion in the first place?
Here’s an example: I had a client a long time ago who was very absent-minded about the mail. He would dump it on an end table every day, until the stack was overflowing and became a huge source of anxiety. Included among the unopened junk mail and letters, of course, were important bills. Blowing them off along with the other mail meant that his credit score started to take a hit, leading to totally unnecessary money drama down the line with credit cards and his mortgage.
And then there’s Anna, who I wrote about before, who was so stuck in her habit of late night TV watching that through a domino effect of constantly sleeping through her alarm she almost lost her job.
The banishing-bad-days success story I might actually be proudest of is my own. When I started my consulting business years ago as a single mom, I knew the stakes were too high to let carelessness bring me down. I forced myself to become totally committed to my day planner. I checked in with it every evening to pace myself for the next day, and kept a close eye on it throughout the day. Even if something unexpected did happen, I was in control enough to plan around it. When there was something extra-important that I needed to remember, I would put reminders on sticky notes all over the house, placed on things I needed to touch, like my toothbrush and the front doorknob. (For more tricks like this, check out my ebooks!)
It might be discouraging to hold yourself accountable for your own bad days, but on the flip side, that means that you have more control in the matter than you thought. Be honest with yourself, and pave the way for more good days in the future.
