Episode 312: 5 ways to help when you feel flat
In today’s episode, Fiona reflects on an upcoming trip, including spending time with a close family member and reuniting with old friends. Fiona shares her strategies for dealing with stress and negative emotions, emphasizing the importance of self-care, reflection, movement, and seeking support from friends. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Being rejected for a podcast appearance
The five steps to Get out of a Funk
Acknowledging it's a bad morning, not a bad day or week
Questioning oneself and identifying the real problem
Reframing the situation and finding a positive perspective
Taking action and making small, achievable goals
Celebrating wins and acknowledging achievements
Importance of taking time for oneself
Dancing as a mood booster
Giving oneself time to wallow and setting a limit
Getting through tough moments in life
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
What I'm going to do is talk you through how I got out of that funk where things were just going wrong and after this, just nothing seemed to be going my way that day. How I got out of that because I did that day. It wasn't like I was like, "Okay, this day has gone to hell. I just may as well just pack it all in." I worked through five steps and I know this sounds like a bit of a listicle clickbait, but honestly, these five steps work every single time.
Welcome to episode 312 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today it is a coaching episode and I'm going to be diving into, I think something that every single business owner deals with multiple times a year, but sometimes it can freeze you and stop you from getting on with anything. If you've ever felt like that, then stay tuned because today I'm talking about the ways to get yourself out of that real funk. Before I get into that, I want to of course acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this beautiful land on which I record this podcast and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders, past and present and acknowledged that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that we are getting closer if you're here in Australia to the end of the financial year. Even if you're not here in Australia, we are getting closer to finishing the first half of this year. If you are wanting to make sure that in the second half of this year, your financials are in a much better state, or if you're here in Australia and you want to make sure that your next financial year is going to be one where you understand what are your revenue streams, what are your survival rates, particularly important as we are all facing a recession and many other massive costs of living that you want to make sure that you know what your actual minimum is that you need to bring in just to survive? Then you might want to check out our course Money Mapping. It is affordable and we've had hundreds of people do this course course and tell us that it has changed the game when it comes to their finances when it comes to understanding their revenue streams and just understanding how to get by in business without having this constant feast and famine approach. If you're interested in that, you can find it plus all our other courses at mydailybusiness.com/courses. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
Have you ever had one of those days where you just feel like everything that can go wrong does go wrong? I had one of these very recently it started the night before when I was reviewing something, one of our systems and realized that part of it was not working and I had not caught it. I'm working with people all day long on their systems and processes for this to not be working and for me not to have caught it for a couple of months was pretty bad. It's not something that our clients will see. It's not something that stuffs up the business in any major way, but for me, I was like, how have I not caught that? And I started to break myself and it's so annoying, and I should have checked this. All the usual things, right?
The next day I get up and it was just a bit of a hectic morning everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I took the dogs out on a walk, they were just being annoying. If anyone has dogs, sometimes they just do your head in and sometimes they're perfect. It's like children. But anyway, taking them out on my walk hadn't slept very well, thanks mainly to my three and a half year old who I love but is not the greatest sleeper. And I was like, maybe a fifth of the way into the walk and it started pouring. It was also freezing cold. And the way that I do my walk is that it's not necessarily easy to just turn around and go back and if you do turn around and go back, it's like you have to do the same amount of walking, you may as well just keep going.
I kept going thinking the rain would hold off, it didn't freeze. I get into the day I'm frozen, I'm behind and I'm feeling a bit cranky at myself about this issue. Somehow in that head space, I decided it would be great for me to pitch myself onto a podcast. Despite running a podcast and I believe in podcasts, they're incredible marketing vehicles and amazing for getting a brand out there. I don't pitch myself onto podcasts very often and it's something that I want to do more often. I was listening to a podcast I often listen to and I saw that they were doing this new thing and I contacted them and put myself forward for it. It's always hard to do that. I don't think that it ever gets easier.
No matter how long you've been doing this, no matter what your relationship is with that person, it is always a bit of a vulnerable moment because you are putting yourself forward and being like, choose me. I got a very quick response saying, “We love your stuff, and we love your book.” But the feedback we've had from our audience is we're not going to be interviewing people in that particular space anymore. It was very quick and I have to give props to this company. I very much respect them. Great service to get back to people quickly. We also hope to do that a lot. We get a lot of podcast requests and I have to say, being on the other side it stings and I'm glad that I have the lovely Yricka that works with me who is always very kind in letting people know that maybe they're not the right fit or to come back to us later or whatever it is.
I had that happen and I was like, are you serious? Not like, I'm so good. Everyone chap found me on their podcast, but it was just a bit of a sting when already wasn't feeling that great. I come in to get my work done, get into the office, and get prepared for the day, and I get an email from Scott, who's my podcast editor to say, “The episode for 308, which is going out very soon, is incorrect.” I don't know what file you've put in there, but it's 11 seconds. And I was like, “What?” I recorded episode 308 and I know that I recorded it because it took so long to record. I had a cough. I was constantly pausing the recording to cough.
It took about an hour and a half to record a 40-minute episode. It was just the words weren't coming out easily, it felt very hard. And usually, this podcast does not feel very hard to do. I was like, “No, I've recorded it. Let me find the file.” Then I remembered, I've got a new laptop, and I want to have a digital declutter. I did not want to clog off my hard drive with stuff. I have been deleting stuff very quickly. The process is, I usually record this stuff on GarageBand and if you want to know any more about my process with podcasting, we have a course, on How to Start a Podcast which is very affordable. We'll show you exactly not just how to start it, but how to keep it going, and what the processes and systems need to be.
And here I am like laughing because this system didn't work. It is the first time in 300-plus episodes that this has ever happened. I record on GarageBand and then I upload that into Google Drive. Then it is between Yricka and Scott, my podcast editor and my OBM to to work with an agency and do other stuff to get it all happening. What had happened was that I had uploaded this other file, this 11 seconds file and because I'd uploaded it and because I'm all like, I want to keep my hard drive free, I deleted stuff and then I went into deleted folder and emptied the trash. I had somehow deleted this very annoying episode that had taken forever to record. I get in on that day, I've been rejected by the podcast, I'd stuffed up a system, I was wet, I was freezing cold and I was like, “Okay, great, thanks so much for that. Also thank you Fiona for stuffing up here.”
I just didn't have another hour and a half to record another episode. What I had to do was take the episode that was already recorded for 312. Thankfully I had recorded a bank ahead of time, making that into 308 and here I am now recording 312. I had something else that I was going to record for 312, but I thought, what I'm going to do is talk you through how I got out of that funk where things were just going wrong and you know this after this, just nothing seemed to be going my way that day. How I got out of that because I did that that day. It wasn't like I was like, “Okay, this day has gone to hell, I just may as well just pack it all in.”
I actually worked through five steps and I know this sounds like a bit like a listicle clickbait, but honestly, these five steps work every single time that I have documented them for myself. And I went through that and was like, “Okay, just do the five steps and hopefully you can shake this off.” What are the five steps? I have to say, please just give this a go. If you are in this headspace right now, please give it a go because I promise you, you will feel better. And maybe if you're not there right now, you're having like life is great, but you know that you will be there in a little while. Bookmark this, and come back to this particular episode. If you want to find it in text format, you can do that at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/312.
But because you will inevitably be every small business owner, we'll go through those days where you're just feeling a bit crappy, a bit flat and you're feeling like you cannot put a foot, right? What did I do first? Well, this had all happened in the morning, I would say before 10:00 AM. The first thing I had to tell myself is that I'm having a bad morning. This is not a bad day, it's not a bad week, it's not a bad month, it's not a bad year. Not everything I do in business is a failure or whatever. All these things that you tell yourself, you have to make sure that you don't let that crappy moment turn into a crappy day and then you take it out on other people and then it's a crappy week forth and suddenly it's like six months in and you haven't got out of this fog.
Again, I'm not talking about hardcore depression or flatlining where you should talk to your GP and go and see a mental health practitioner. I'm talking about just those days where it's an off day when you're just having that Monica song from the 1990s when she's like, it's just one of them days. I can't sing so forgive my audio just then, but it's one of those days where you are just not loving life. That's the difference. I just want to point that out. It's not where you are stuck in a full-on depression and you need some serious help and support with that. It is just where you are having a crappy 24 hours or even like I said, the morning. That's the first thing I did. I stood there in my kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil and I said out loud about five times, “You are just having a bad morning Killackey, you are just having a bad morning.” I said that like I said so many times out loud.
You could write it in a journal if that's going to be better for you. If you are in a place where you can't out loud talk to yourself then, I mean go to the bathroom, pretend you're talking to somebody on the phone, you need to get it out of yourself. I think sometimes saying it out loud or putting it into a journal entry can help just dilute it because you are just you're being a friend to yourself. If a friend came to you and was like, I'm wrong at this and I stuffed this up, you would just say, you're just having a bad day. Take some deep breaths, you're having a bad day. I was the first thing I made a cup of tea and I told myself that.
I also believe in the power of nurturing yourself and giving yourself the moment to have a cup of tea or to brew something like a coffee or whatever else it is that you want hot water with lemon, whatever it is. Even just a glass of water to give yourself that breathing space to stop and reflect. And in this case, I was saying it out loud to myself. It's the first thing to understand that you are not in this position forever. You are having a crappy time right now and try and corral it like this is a bad morning, it's not a bad week. It was the first thing that I did. Again, I know this can sound fluffy, but it is very powerful to do this stuff, to remind yourself you are in a bad moment. This is not going to last forever. You are not going to think like this forever. you're not going to get rejection after rejection after rejection. It's just right now that you are feeling like this, you are in the heat right now.
The second thing I did, and this is important, was that I questioned myself. I had my nice cup of tea, I drink about six cups of tea a day. I love it. I sat down with my tea. I am very lucky in that I work from home, I work in an office out the back, but the majority of the time or most of the time, no one else is home while I'm working. I went into our house, I made the cup of tea and then we have these beautiful armchairs from Anaca Studio, an incredible small business based in Melbourne, and Claire who runs that is originally from France.
She just has impeccable taste and design aesthetic. Years ago I got these chairs and I have to say they are my thinking chairs and I always sit in them when I want to think about something, when I want to digest something, when I want to have a lovely conversation with a friend, I will sit in those armchairs. I sat in the armchair, I had my cup of tea and I had a notebook with me and I just wrote what is bothering me. That is one of the biggest questions to ask yourself because sometimes you have something else going on, but you are projecting and hiding behind some other problem and say, it's so annoying because this my staff member didn't do this or it's super annoying because a client did this or we got this horrible customer complaint from somebody who walked into the store today.
You're hiding behind that, that's not the problem, the problem is something else. I wrote that at the top and I just wrote, what's bothering me? Because it wasn't this podcast rejection, it wasn't I just thought of that when I was listening to them. It wasn't like, I've been thinking about this for weeks and I'm going to pitch myself and it's this big thing and it's on my bucket list. It wasn't like that. I'd listen to the podcast on my walk in the rain. I thought I'm going to pitch myself to that. I had to think, I'm in this crappy mood and I can't understand exactly why it is and I'm blaming these things, but is it that? And it could well be that, but I knew myself that something else was going on I just started writing down the stuff that I'm worried about at the moment.
There was the house, I mean now we have got a settlement date, which is great, but anyone who has sold a house and bought a house at the same time. I understand what a privileged position that is to be in and I'm incredibly thankful for that. But it is a very stressful time because you are trying to coordinate everything to happen. I'm also going overseas soon and something that was coming up when I just sat there and allowed myself the space to think was that this trip that I'm going to take is going to be quite emotional. I am going to be spending some time with my dad's last remaining sibling, one of the closest members of my family and probably the closest person to me in that age bracket. My parents are both deceased and I don't have any relatives in Australia besides my siblings.
This is a particularly close member of my family who is in a position in his health. I mean he's going to kick on, he's great, he's fit and healthy, but he's got some stuff going on, which means that he's not going to ever come to Australia again. It is too long of a trip. I am going to see him and I cannot wait for that, but that is going to be an emotional thing. I have not seen him since my mom passed away. He came out after the funeral to help our family and everything else, but I have not seen him since my dad passed away. I've talked to him many times, but I've never seen him and there's a lot about him that is very similar to my dad. They're in the same family. That is going to be an emotional thing.
Plus when I say goodbye, I don't know when is the next time that I'm going to see him because he lives in the US and he's on a long plane trip from Australia. There's a lot in that space of time. It's not a huge amount of time that I'm able to spend with him, but it's some time. Then I am going to London, which is a place that I used to live in for a long time and carries a huge amount of memories from me. It's where we had our first child. Many other things have gone on there and I'm going to be meeting up with a bunch of people I haven't seen in 10 years. That is going to be emotional. Then I'm going to go and see my aunt in Dublin, who is my mom's sister, who has got virtually the same voice as my mother and is so similar to my mother that for a while I couldn't even contemplate calling her because it was too painful after I'd just lost my mom.
I'm seeing her and then I'm going to go and meet one of my best, my best friends from Amsterdam in a beautiful part of Spain. That holiday and trip and I'm also doing a bunch to do with my book over there, interviewing a bunch of people and other stuff. It's a lot, but there's also a lot of emotion tied up with that trip. Yes, it is part work, part family, part, holiday part, everything, but it carries a lot of emotion in there. I've got that plus moving, plus all the usual things. I've realized I wasn't annoyed that much about the stuff that was going on in my business. I was just feeling a lot of stress and just staff emotions under the surface that potentially I wasn't letting come to the surface and processing those.
I was just caught up in the day-to-day today thing. I sat there and reflected on that. I did a quick breathing exercise and I thought, that's actually what I'm upset about or not even upset, but that's what's going on right now, and I need to pay attention to it. That was an important thing to sit with that cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable and ask yourself. Even if like I don't have time to sit there and have a cup of tea, you do, everyone has time and the people who say they don't have the time need this the most, they need to stop and slow down the most. We can all slow down for five to 10 minutes to sit and contemplate and think about stuff and turn our phones off and just be with that moment.
What is bothering me right now? What is going on for me right now? As I said, you could write something in a journal, you can just take a bit of time, and you could record yourself on a voice note to yourself. You could do a thousand different things to come up with that, do a meditation, but sit there and consider what is going on. Because sometimes quite often you're upset about one thing. It's something else that is the cause or the issue that you need to be concerned with. After that, that was heavy thinking. It wasn't heavy always necessarily like that's a bad thing. It was just grounding me and coming back to, this is what's happening right now. The third thing I did, and I know this might seem a bit of a like jarring thing to go from number two to number three, but the third thing I did was to dance.
I had that cup of tea and I danced around my kitchen. Now I have two dogs who just don't believe that they should ever be outside. Quite often they're inside and on this particular day it was raining, it was cold, they were inside and they just watched me dance and I danced. I danced straight to three songs in the kitchen. I danced to Hate On Me by Jill Scott, which is always a cracker. I love that song. I have come to that song so many times. If you don't know who Jill Scott is, do yourself a favour, and go and listen to all her albums. But Jill Scott is an incredible musician, singer, and songwriter out of the US actor and she wrote this song Hate On Me, years ago now. I think I remember seeing her interviewed and she was talking about how this was about her cousin or somebody in her family who was giving her grief because they believed that everything is super easy for her now that she's made it in the music world.
I think if you have been annoyed by a customer complaint or an email or something, then this is a great song to dance to Hate On Me. The other songs that I danced to were About Damn Time by Lizzo, and the other one was Get Me Bodied, which again, I always fall back on that by Beyonce. I don't understand how that song did not get more airplay when it first came out, but Get Me Bodied, especially the extended mix. It is so good. I danced around the kitchen to those and there is scientific evidence that says movement and shaking the body and doing all sorts of things can help so much with mood and that's why you're told to go outside and have a do walk or run or dance or play or whatever your body can do to, to move it in whatever way is possible for you.
I danced around the kitchen and I have to say it instantly made me feel better. We used to do a kitchen dance-off at 8:30 every morning during the pandemic when we were in lockdown, my son and I and my other son and sometimes my husband too. And we would put on music because music can be so uplifting and helpful and I have a joke but not joke with my eldest where if he's in like getting in a mood or he's annoyed about something or at the shops and he's asked for something and I say no and he's just in this mood, I'm like, “Shake it off, dude.” Sometimes I'll embarrass him by shaking and shimming around in the middle of Safeway, Woolworths and I'll just do it.
I know that's because when you do shake it off, you get back into your body and out of your head and you're in a better space. That was the third thing I did. I cannot stress enough how well that works. One of my good friends Paul, his morning routine is to have a bit of a dance, get the body moving, get the energy in the right place that you want it to be. That was the number three dance. I just absolutely love it. Number four, this is a big one and this is something that always when I've come to this step can be a difficult thing, especially if you're a bit stubborn. The four thing, is to consider, do I want to wallow or work through it?
You've got two W's there, wallow and work through. If you are going to wallow, give yourself a time limit. Again, I'm not talking about something that's big like grief or something major, a business partnership breaking up, filing for bankruptcy, whatever that is. Not like, just wallow for an hour and then get over it. But I'm talking about in this instance where it was, it was not like, okay, this is going to destroy me, I'm just having a crappy morning, remember 0.1, I'm just having a bad morning. What I did was I considered how long do I want to wallow and what I wanted to wallow, it was one more cup of tea. I made another cup of tea and I sat there. I thought about things and I thought about just how I could have done this a bit differently to make myself have not felt so crap in the morning.
I came up with some stuff, but I gave myself that timeframe. I can have the rest of this tea and that's it. I often do that, not necessarily wallowing, but just giving myself a timeframe in the middle of the day, I want to watch this episode of whatever, or I want to do this or I'm going to go for a walk or I'm going to sit in the hammock outside and I'm going to do it for this amount of time. I think it's something that the more you do, the easier it is to stick to that timeframe. In this case, I had my cup of tea again, I sat down in those lovely Anaca Studio chairs and just thought about it and was like, by the time this tea is finished you're going to shake it off, get on with the rest of the day.
I had clients to see, I had other things to get on with and I didn't have the time to necessarily just sit there and wallow, but that's 0.4. If you're going to wallow, that's fine, give yourself a deadline though, even if it's to the next day you're like, I'm just going to be off and sad until tomorrow and that's fine. This part of the joy of being a business owner is that you can control your time to some degree, even if you're like, I'm swamped, I've got staff, I've got this. You can always go into a separate room, you can always say, I've got a family emergency I've got to leave for. You can always do something to give yourself a bit of space and a bit of time. That is number four. And number five, super important was to call a friend.
I didn't do that in that timeframe. I had my morning then around 10:00 AM went and did all of this and then I had to start coaching at about, one o'clock that day. But I had a chunk of work to do, I had to rerecord an episode, all of that. I gave myself a bit of time to get this done and then I set a date to talk to one of my friends. This is one of my friends who also has a small business, totally get it. I put that time on the calendar. Even if you can't call them then and there when you are in the heat of it, you can message and you can set a date, you can say, is there any chance I could call you at this time?
Or do you have time today to talk? Or could I call you this evening? Or I'm having a bit of a rough time when can I talk to you? It's important, I'm always saying, no business is an island. We all need to have support and lean on each other and you need to have people around you to do that. If you don't have people around you get in touch. Because I know lots of people who would love to connect with other small business owners and sometimes you can find the most incredible people in the most unusual of places. I'm very lucky in that. I get to meet small business owners all day long at my job. But also that I have quite a few friends who are also small business owners and have gone through tough times. Even just recently yesterday I was talking to a good friend who is also a small business owner and I was talking about something else in our personal lives and they relayed that something else has happened to them similarly.
It's just so nice to have that connection and to know that you're not alone, you're not the only one making mistakes, you're not all these things. It's just so powerful. I think that 0.5 is important. In addition to all of these, and I'll just recap number one, make sure that you're just confining the stuff to when it's happening. Telling myself, you're just having a bad morning, allowed me to be like, this isn't something I'm going to spiral. And the rest of the day and the week and the year feels like crap. It's like, you're just having a crappy time in this moment and it's not going to last forever. I also made myself a cup of tea. Number two was to sit down with that cup of tea and to consider what is bothering me, what am I feeling some way about or having these big emotions over.
Number three was to dance, to shake that energy out, to have fun, to listen to music. I often listen to music that I listen to in my younger years. I feel like that brings its own memory and everything else back to your body and you feel good. It's releasing all these great endorphins. Number four was to consider if I'm going to wallow, how long am I going to give myself? That was number four. And number five was to make time to talk to a friend. And even if that is a week away, you've put it in, you've connected with that person, you've made a diary date and it's going to happen. And by then you're probably completely over what was you probably even can't remember what you're annoyed about, but it's good to know that is there and psychologically to be like, I have somebody else to talk to about this. I don't have to shoulder everything by myself.
The other thing to remember is that if you have been in business even for any length of time, and even if you have not been in business, but you're just alive, you're reading this, you have tough and crap moments that have happened to you, but you've had hard moments and you have worked through those and you are here today and those moments did not kill you. You have kept going. You have been stronger sometimes because of those moments. remind yourself of that as well. And it can be hard to remind yourself of that. But to think about this, I think Emily Cox head, she's a like an artist-illustrator out of the UK, I think she has a cup, or she had maybe on her Instagram ages ago that was like every single moment in your life has led you to here so you can get through anything.
That's the same idea. You can and you will get through so much in life and nothing is a beautiful rainbow for everyone all the time. Nothing. I work with some people who have huge Instagram followers who have these incredible businesses and they're so proud and they should be. They still have crappy days, they still have days when they are questioning themselves and questioning everything. Am I making the wrong decisions? Everywhere I go, everybody goes through it. And just remind yourself, you also have gone through this before and you'll get over it and you'll get through it.
The other thing I just wanted to leave you with is a quote by Dave Ramsey. I know lots of people you know have their ideas about Dave Ramsey. I don't mind him. I mean from what I've seen, I dunno everything about the guy, but he is a radio personality in the US. He gives a lot of financial advice and one of the things that he says is, “The only variable I can control is me, and I'm going to control that variable.”
That's important when you are in that head space where you're just feeling a bit crap and a bit lacklustre and it's like, I can't control the external things, I can't control that. That podcast said I can't control that I've made a mistake in my business and I didn't catch something. I can't control certain things, but what I can control is my response to them. My mom used to always say this as well, life is 10% what happens to you 90% how you react. I think that is so important. And again, I'm not trying to dismiss major, horrible things that are happening, but I'm trying to, when you're thinking about those days when you're just having a bit of crap day, a bit of a like the moniker, one of those days that you remind yourself that you can control how you react to that and how much time and energy that you give it, which is another point I might just make.
I'm always saying this to my son and my husband and I often say this as well. You have 24 hours in the day, you have a certain amount of energy. How much energy do you want to give this? Sometimes I'll be complaining about something and my husband will say, “How much energy do you want to give this?” And I'll realize, I don't even want to have a conversation about this because it's not worth my time. And with my son, my eldest, I'm constantly saying to him not to gloss over things. Of course, you can give some energy to some crappy things that have happened, but don't give all of your 24 hours of energy to it because then you don't have energy for something else that might be much more exciting and enjoyable.
That is it for today's coaching episode. I hope you found it useful. If you did find it useful, maybe share it with a friend who needs to hear this right now and if you found it useful and you so wish, I would love it if you could leave us a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you usually listen. It just helps other small business owners find this podcast. Thank you so much for reading. As I said, the show notes for this will be available at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/312. Thanks for reading.
