You don’t always pick up the biggest lessons from books or some long speech in class. Most of the time it’s from random little things you notice in the middle of your day. And when one of those sticks, it kind of stays in your head for good, even if you didn’t mean for it to.
You’d be surprised, but in five minutes you can learn something that actually follows you your whole life.
Your life is largely affected by the decisions that you make, and the actions that you take.
A lot of the times, the damage you cause to yourself or your immediate colleagues is a result of two things: Imbalanced thinking, and angry actions.
Confused thoughts:
- If you wanna clear your head, honestly just move a little, stretch, walk, anything / it wakes the brain up. Your brain automatically gets more blood flow, and you can get far better ideas if you go on a short walk, or do some push-ups, or just a little bit of jogging.
- This not only will help you get better ideas but also more fruitful ideas.
One thing that actually helps is scribbling quick notes when an idea pops up. You tell yourself ‘I’ll remember it later’ but half the time it’s gone. Write it down quick, even if it’s on some random paper lying around If you catch it in the moment, later you’ve got something real to come back to instead of that “what was it again” feeling.
Controlling emotions and actions:
- To control the emotions, and most importantly, actions taken after you are angry, you really need to learn (to not send an angry email).
- All you need to do is: You can type an email if you want. You can be as angry as you want to be, but DO NOT send it.
- Save it and keep it in outlook saved email folder. Go for about 15 minutes of hard running and vigorous exercise.
- Whatever anger you have contained within yourself, throw all that anger in the exercise.
- Then when you return, not only your muscles will be stronger, but also, your mind will be calmer. This way, you practice and comport yourself with restraint.
- Then re-type the same email in the most polite words, and state only the facts that matter.
- Should you choose, you can even wait an entire day before sending the email.
This is one of the most important things I observed between junior engineers, and really amazing managers wherever I worked.
- Really amazing managers never lose their patience.
- They stay focused and stay on course.
- They look at facts and figures and keep angry emotions away from the workplace.
- They take actions when things fail no matter what the root cause of the failure is, and contain the problem.
- Then when they have analyzed all the facts and done all the postmortems, make clear decisions and take actions.
It is far more important to have an unbiased, calm, methodical, and clear thinking than to operate with anger at work place.
Now some of you might visualize Steve Jobs and would say ~ “wow! He was quite the opposite”, but don’t forget that before you actually build the attitude of Steve Jobs, you really need to build the skills of Steve Jobs.
To read this whole post, I think I have taken your 3-6 minutes, but if you do these things a few times, I guarantee you that you would get a lot more respect at your work place, and would build trust and connections for a long term.
Give it some time, a few months talking and dealing with people, and you kinda notice you’re not snapping like before. You wait more, you breathe more, patience sneaks in, and honestly that’s a real win.