My disruption: my new daughter
How to Protect Your Goals, Even When Life Doesn't Help
Despite our best intentions, life has a tendency to get in the way of executing our carefully designed plans. This type of disruption might come from any direction (personal, professional, health, etc) but the impacts will likely be felt in every aspect of your life.
Disruptions don't just happen to the unlucky few; they happen to everyone. If you find yourself disrupted, here are five steps you need to take minimize the negative affects on your goals.
Missing in action
Some of you may have noticed my decreased activity on softuary.net for the past few months. No, I've not simply been lazy. My life was disrupted by a personal life "project" involving a three country adoption of a one year-old girl from China.
Dealing with three countries' worth of bureaucracy was (and is) difficult, but once the adoption procedure was finalized and the three weeks worth of travel reunited my wife, myself and our new daughter with the rest of our family, the hard reality of raising a new one year-old has truly set in. Those of you with children know exactly what I'm talking about.
Babies are the very definition of "disruptive".
The effects of the adoption and our new daughter joining our family were far-reaching and both positively and negatively influenced me as a person and a professional.
Despite my initial plans of continuing to work at my usual frenzied pace to achieve the personal and professional goals I had set, reality showed me that there is not enough hours in the day, nor energy in my body, to accomplish everything. So some deliverables started to suffer and work began to pile up.
Have this situation ever happened to you?
Luckily, there are strategies you can use when life disrupts your goals to turn the entire situation to your advantage.
Strategies
1. Re-evaluate your short and long-term priorities
It's likely that the goals you considered important before the disruption have increased or decreased in importance since. Life seldom gives us the luxury of remaining static. Now is a good time to re-evaluate your priorities and align your energy and time to those priorities.
For example, perhaps you set yourself an ambitious goal to exercise four times a week, and then your spouse falls ill with a long-term illness. Is working out at that intensity level still the most significant to you? Or has caring for your family superseded it in importance?
Go to your priority list and revise as necessary (you do have a priority list, don't you?).
If you're like me, this has a grounding, calming effect. By resetting your priorities, you are acknowledging areas of your life that were important have fallen to a lower priority position due to the new circumstances in your life. This acknowledgment of lower priority allows your current self to not do certain tasks and projects your old self planned to do.
Give yourself the freedom. Drop them (or postpone them by 6 or 12 months).
It feels good.
2. Don't let it all fall apart
There is a trap that we can all fall into when a major life disruption occurs in our lives: don't let it take over everything.
Go back to the four pillars of long-term success:
- Nutrition
- Sleep
- Exercise
- Stress management
When a disruption forces you to drop things, or you simply run out of time, choose your casualties with care. Begin by removing items from your task list and calendar from the bottom up (for example, remove your daily meditation (#4 Stress Management) before you abandon your daily exercise (#3 Exercise).
Avoid the temptation to let everything go and start living on McDonald's hamburgers (#1 Nutrition) and limited disrupted sleep (#2 Sleep).
Fast food and poor sleep cannot fuel a great life.
“Fast food and poor sleep cannot fuel a great life.”
3. Let people around you (including your stakeholders) know about your situation
I am continuously amazed at how understanding and supportive people can be when you open up to them in an authentic way. When I began to share our adoption story with co-workers and friends, the outpouring of support and help from all directions was humbling. Their help with achieving goals and adjusting deadlines was crucial for me.
One important note is that people will give you leeway short-term, but in the long-term, they expect the high performance that you've delivered in the past. You should not and cannot live at a reduced effectiveness and productivity level due to your life disruption and expect to keep the same respect and rewards you had before the disruption.
If the disruption persists into becoming your new normal, you either need to recover your performance, or change your life, but your stakeholders and friends cannot cover for you indefinitely. And please don't ask them to.
4. Adapt your processes
For example, perhaps you wake up early in the morning to get a jumpstart on your competition and achieve many of your goals, but the reduced amount and lower quality of sleep you're getting due to a new disruption is causing problems. What can you do?
We all have and use processes each day to help us achieve our goals. This applies to both small (catching a bus at a certain time and place each day to allow us to go to the grocery store) and big (structuring a new business deal) processes.
The key to adapting our processes is knowing which processes we use. Many people go through their daily lives like actors, without realizing they are playing a part. Likewise, each day we use certain processes (some we've developed unconsciously and others were given to us by our jobs, society, etc).
If you haven't spent time constructing your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly routines for optimum performance, then it is likely that you aren't sure which "processes" you use, and need to adapt. No problem, identification of our processes is not hard, but it does require some thinking.
Visualize your past few days and answer these three simple questions:
- Where did you go?
- What did you do?
- How did you do what you did?
The answers to these questions will give you clues to your personal processes.
Write down each one (for example, "take dog for 30 minute walk around the neighborhood").
Now, critically analyze how well each step of your recent days went and answer the question:
- Which of these things went well before the disruption, but now are suffering?
For each process that has suffered due to the life disruption, brainstorm alternatives and ways to improve it.
5. Look at the disruption as a gift, and be grateful.
This last technique is often overlooked but in many ways it has the potential to be the most powerful. This power comes from re-framing how you look at your life disruption. Change the way you view it from:
- DISABLER to ENABLER
- DISTRACTION to OPPORTUNITY
- LIMITER to TEACHER
Use your journaling time to reflect on how your disruption is improving your life. Your mindset will make or break your ability to overcome new challenges.
You can do it！
Depending on the type of life disruption you are working through, it might be a major, permanent life change, or just a temporary annoyance. Either way, these five techniques will give you the tools you need to judo-like outmaneuver your disruption, and potentially use its power to improve.
You have the power to overcome your disruption. You own it. It does not own you!
Take care, and I'll talk to you next time.
Question: What are other techniques you use to overcome disruptions in your life? Let us know in the comment section below.