manage – From the desk of Adam Thomas

No one is better at criticizing yourself than you are.

Who else knows where all the buried bodies are? You are the only person that knows every secret you’ve held, every person you’ve wronged, and all the mistakes you’ve made. All those phony apologies, well, you know those too.

When it comes to all the mistakes you’ve made you are a bona fide expert. It holds you back, because you can’t get better without giving yourself permission first.

That is where it starts. Punishment comes from all sides, even from our own head. We have to decide to turn off the valve of self-destruction and decide to stop adding on to the pain. Only then can the process of healing begin.

There is a concept in money management where when you get your paycheck you stop and pay yourself first. You do this because often with money, we forget to take the time to think about ourselves. You take the time to worry about the urgent and not the future.

We treat ourselves that way. In self management, you have to start with forgiving yourself first, because we don’t think about the future, we think about the urgent.

So, give yourself the chance to get better.

Start with yourself and forgive.

So, you are sitting in your room and its time to get the day started.

It’s time to decide, one that is going to make your day.

You begin by asking yourself this question:

“Do I go to the library or stay here.”

You’ve already lost at that point.

Now, this sounds odd but stay with me on this.

What you just did was create a false choice. By closing off all the possibilities down to two things – you’ve started the path of relying on willpower to make a move. Instead of propelling progress, you’ve opened up a door for your fear and doubt to walk in. This is a battle I lose often, and I am betting you’ve too.

The real choice is that you have full reign on your day. Nothing is off the table.

I often work best when I manage the opportunities I have and then make myself have none when its time for action.

Manage – Take a block of time, and come up with all the possibilities. List them all out on a notepad, draw them up on a whiteboard, have a brain storming meeting (if you are in a group) whatever floats your boat. Then is the part where you put everything in the middle of the table – no idea is too strange. Then you spend time chopping them down, slotting, and organizing where you want to go. There are a ton of methods on how to do this.

Action – Then, just action. Follow a plan and give yourself no quarter. Just start blasting all of it away as fast as you can. Fear and doubt have no places to hide when the only thing in front of you is just the action.

This is a cycle. Sometimes the work needs to stop because the plan needs to change. Sometimes you need just to stop planning and get to the action. All this is on the task at hand. But, the key is you have to choose to do one or the other. Trying to do both on the fly makes things complicated, and it can end up with you wondering where your day went.