Can't Hide Crazy (Part 1)

Yep, I've said it many times, "You Can't Hide Crazy." Although there are a number of ways I can go into how that principle applies to life, today I wanted to talk about how "we can't hide" our own crazy. Teaching leadership, conflict management and of course defensive tactics I often say that if you are a mess on the inside, it's hard to keep it together on the outside.When thinking about emotions and attitude you can either let the situation, person or emotion control you or you can decide to keep control of yourself. If you cannot control your own emotions, people can take advantage of this, circumstances can get out of your control and you will not be able to control anything else in your life. 

We all feel emotions, it’s natural, it’s normal, it’s good and it’s healthy as long as those emotions are not a detriment to you making decisions and you living your life.  Let’s face it, feeling intimidated, guilt, stress, fear, panic, loneliness, anger, worry, etc are natural emotions. However, if you let those emotions overwhelm you too much you will not always make the best decision. 

How do you prevent yourself from being burned out? 

Take a few minutes and write down as many things as you can think of that helps you to relieve stress and give you a more balanced perspective.

How do you decompress? Is it a cup of coffee in the morning, reading the paper, is it getting a nice sleep, time with your family, a yearly vacation, yoga, what is it? How do you re-focus?   

Here are some of the things that I've come up with that often helps maintain a foundational grounding:

1)    Getting a good night sleep and ample rest is essential.  Regular exercise is also very effective in helping you to maintain this idea of foundational grounding. 

2)   Good Fuel for your body! Eating a balanced diet, not too much sugar, not too much caffeine, eating lots of fruits and vegetables, eating good, lean, low fat meals is helpful. 

3)    Having quiet time, meditation, service to others is another very important aspect of this idea of foundational grounding. 

4)     Connecting yourself with something larger than you is huge in being grounded.

5)    Surrounding yourself with positive people, people that will help to inspire you, not people that will bring you down. 

6)    Reading inspirational stories, watching inspiring movies and this type of thing will also help to ground you and pull you through tough times.

7)     Continual learning.

8)    Closure, take care of your regrets, apologize to your mom for yelling at her last week at the family reunion, take that employee into your office and tell him what you think, ask him for forgiveness if you need to if you do a bad.  Take care of your regrets, have closure before it’s too late. 
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9)   Surround yourself with good, supportive, cool people! 
10)  Don't Sweat the Small Stuff!!  Learn to breath, relax and let go! Thank

These things will help you to maintain a much better sense of balance and grounding in your life. The better balanced and grounded that you are, the less likely you are to become overly emotional during a stressful situation.  When some person experiences road rage because you took his parking spot, do you really honestly think that he’s upset because you parked in that space?  Is it just about that, or is it something, maybe many things throughout his life that led up to him being so angry about that one incident?  So really think about these foundational things in your life that can help you maintain your balance.  Greek philosopher Socrates said, “know thyself.”  This is a very powerful concept to embrace.   

Keep going!

~Craig