You can’t start with great.
You might start with average, decent, ok. Or more often, you will start with poor, näive, ineffectual.
And that’s where you will have to continue from. One step after the next. From horrible to passable, from decent to respectable, from good to fantastic.
You can’t start with great.
You can, though, end with legendary.
Sometimes we get annoyed at people and situations merely because they are not where they want them to be.
We might have spotted potential in someone, or we might just have grown sensitive to a behaviour that repeats over time.
We might have envisioned a better world, or we might just have had enough of a culture where we feel we don’t fit.
Easing into what is will give us and the others the opportunity to change, to grow closer, to eventually meet in a place where we are better and they are better.
That’s true improvement.
Once you’ve identified your triggers, the point is not to stay away from them or drown in the anticipation of the pain they will expose you to. The point is to find ways to manage them and gradually master them.
If you are comfortable around somebody you can’t avoid, take control of your encounters and suggest whatever makes you feel at ease.
If presenting in front of a vast audience is too much for you, volunteer every time there is a small presentation to give.
If you are afraid your boss might ask questions about a delicate issue, make sure you will be the first to raise the topic, at a time convenient for you, with the words you have chosen and rehearsed.
You can prepare for almost everything, as long as you choose to train the right muscles.
To stop you from checking emails when you are not supposed to, think about the following.
Are you checking because you can take a meaningful action or out of curiosity?
If knowing the content of a mail now changes the way you act (compared to what you’d do if you would check at the appropriate time), that is a meaningful action.
In all honesty, there are very few cases where this is true.
Our opinion is not stronger if we share it now or tomorrow. Hearing some feedback is not going to make us change now, and probably it won’t tomorrow. Checking now if that email we have been waiting for has finally arrived is not going to give us a headstart on tomorrow’s work.
More often, it’s curiosity that drives us. It’s the dopamine hit we get from knowing something, even though it does not affect our possibility to do something about it. It’s like scrolling your social media timeline out of boredom.
We can train at keeping that impulse under control.
The impulse to control, dictate, micro-manage is strong.
We just have to think carefully at what happens when we do it.
Example: a colleague is planning to send out an important email. You submit to the impulse and ask to review it first. The colleague obliges and shares a draft with you. You once again submit to the impulse and, since you do not really have time for this, give them some broad feedback about tone of voice and points to make. They edit the draft and send it back. For the third time, you submit to the impulse and go deep with comments, edits, and formatting. They end up sending your version.
The results.
That is a lot of negativity spread around just because you once sent out an email that – in that particular context – turned out to get a pretty positive response.
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