Let It Go

Your best customer just ended their long-term relationship. A terrific employee just left to go back to school. Your favorite lip color was discontinued. For a little while maybe you feel like you’re not you. That enough changed that you can’t feel the same. You feel diminished. You spend a lot of time thinking about why, how, what? You think about how it might never be as good.

Guess what? Remember that one thing has stayed constant. You’re still YOU. Maybe the things around you changed, but you’re wasting precious moments having all those diminished thoughts. Wake up tomorrow and let it all go. Remember that everything you were before the change didn’t change who you are. Muster yourself and look forward to the next big thing. The next customer. The next great employee. An even nicer lip gloss. Take all of who you still are, you’re ideas, your experience, your creativity, your talents, your skills, your knowledge and your abilities and go out into the world and show up big. Grab that next gig.

Planning and Doing

Are you a smart person? Then I just know that you often take more time planning than doing. Planning includes thinking about what you’re going to do – even in the middle of the night when the woodpecker in your head is making lists and checking them twice. Smart people research, question, process, list, spreadsheet and write lists on napkins. Well if that’s you, it’s time to stop overdoing it. I’m suggesting that while a plan is important, sometimes you just have to get started and plan some of it later when the terrific idea turns out to be worth it. Make it happen. You’re smart enough to get started a bit before the plan is perfect. Get in the game. As they say, you can’t win it if you’re not in it. And while you’re planning, someone else has already started and might be ahead of you.

Keep Some of It a Secret

When we finally get a chance to tell others something about what we do for a living, we really want to make a positive impression. Maybe we’re doing that elevator pitch. Or a sales pitch. Or maybe we’re just telling someone who we are when we’re networking. So what do we do? We become verbal volcanoes. We tell them everything we do, everything we know, and just how brilliant we are at it. We want them to think we’re the smartest person who ever did what we do. Right? In our avalanche of Words! Words! Words!, we think they’ll “get it.” Absolutely NOT. They start to tune us out. They filter what they’re hearing. They get lost in our babble.

Instead, tell them ONLY what they need to know. And how do we know what that is? Let THEM tell you everything they need. Listen. And by the way, the anagram for “listen” is “silent”. Give them the highlights and make them pay for the rest.

Decisions. Decisions. Decisions.

Nearly every hour of our professional life is filled with things we must decide. We let things go because we’re indecisive. It feels sometimes like we’re suffocating in things we must decide. As long our to-do list might be, we may also have a list of things that need a simple decision. If you’re like me, I can’t even decide what to keep in my to-do pile or if I should let it go and throw it out, I have hundreds of things I’ve saved, “just in case,” that I haven’t used in 20 years. So we postpone it to “later.” And we let the stacks, the lists, the piles, the decision get bigger.

Let’s make a pack today to touch everything once. Do it just one day. Postpone nothing that you encounter for just one day. Decide what we’re gonna keep and what we’re getting rid of. Even one day could give us the momentum to do it again because it’ll feel so good and accomplished. So what are you going to toss out? What will you finally decide? Which pile or email are you going to delete or clean up once and for all?

The Negative Caveats in Advance

We all introduce ourselves around the room in many networking situations. When that part of the meeting is announced, I often hear groans and the litany of negative caveats. “I hate doing this.” “I don’t speak well in front of a room.” “I never get it right.”

People say these things even before they get started. Why. To lower our expectations? To apologize for their content? We introduce ourselves to have people get the first impression. Or to hear the wonderful things you’ve accomplished. You know what I mean.

Do you think that somebody will look at you strangely? Are you afraid you might use the wrong words? Right away you make it mean something bad: “They won’t like the way I said it. They probably don’t think I’m all that great, they’re probably right; I ‘m probably not.”

Forget about it. Half the room isn’t listening because they’re preparing what they gonna say. And you are torturing yourself needlessly. You are zapping all your own positive energy when you second guess yourself and start out negative. Usually you are wrong about that negative perception anyway.

So start out thinking, “I’m gonna knock it out of the park.” And you will.. Guaranteed.