“Oh Lord, Lord, Lord, what a week it has been” … have you ever found yourself saying this to those around you? Well I’ve just had one of those weeks. But I’m not going to do what usually comes next… (I won’t dump all the frustrating details on you). Instead, I’d rather use this as a valuable object lesson.

Everybody’s had weeks (or months) like I just described, when you’re rocking along, getting everything done smoothly and efficiently, and then >POW!< here comes a landslide of unexpected interruptions and problems from every direction. In other words, you’re hit by a colossal shit-storm.

When that kind of storm starts, at first you try to keep going. You’ll bear down, pour on more effort, and work harder to keep moving forward. That’ll usually power you through, but not this time. Because now here come even more problems. Manure – all kinds of manure – keeps piling on. And soon you’re busy with so much unwanted activity that you can’t get to the things you really want to be doing.

Your nice, ambitious To-Do list is out the window, of course, along with your entire schedule and possibly an armload of commitments and promises you’ve made to others.

Unfortunately, this experience is pretty much universal. We all get these crap-storms sometimes. Why? Well, truthfully… damfino.

There are a thousand weighty sounding theories about why stuff happens, about why you’ll get a horrible cold or your back will suddenly go out or your Internet service will disappear or the electricity to your building will go off exactly when you’re about to launch an exciting new project. So yeah, there are theories, and there’s probably even some truth in some of them. But when you’re up to your ass in alligators and can’t make any headway in your original project because of all the distractions, most of those thousand theories sound more like smart-aleck taunts than real help.

I’ve seldom found theory to be worth anything out in the field, so I’m not going to offer you any theories here – only some action tips on what to do next time the crap hits the fan and you find yourself way off course.

Action Tip #1: Keep your drama to yourself

First, nobody really cares anyway – except that, once you start it, they think that gives them license to dump their own little dramas back onto you. Start a cycle like that, and pretty soon you’re stuck in a little commiseration party. Just don’t do it.

Second, anytime you’re relating all your titanic struggles, you’re really just trying to explain why you didn’t do what you said you’d do – in other words, you’re making excuses (more about that in a moment).

Action Tip #2: Don’t sugar coat things in your mind

It’s far better to just accept what happened: unplanned events got in the way this time and you got pulled off track for a while. Your most profitable approach will be to face the facts, extract the lessons contained in the situation, figure out what to do next time, and simply move forward as soon as you can. This is the exact opposite of excuse-making.

You’ve seen it in movies, right? The honorable young hero screws up, then while his commanding officer is reaming him a new one, he says stoically, “No excuse, sir.” Well, believe it or not, that’s the best attitude you can have if you want to be an achiever.

It ignores all the “whys” and frees you to cut straight to the “whats and hows” of a situation. And that’s the ONLY place you’ll ever find usable solutions.

Action Tip #3: Learn to hate excuses

So now we come back to this matter of excuses. Simply put, an excuse is a cheap, shabby little trick the mind plays to keep from taking responsibility for a failure.

It’s the mind saying: “it wasn’t my fault… all this other stuff got in my way and kept me from it… I’m just a well-meaning but powerless little bit of flotsam being tossed this way and that by the overwhelming tides of life….” When we put it in those terms, it’s pretty obvious how excuse-making encourages us to have less power.

The sooner we can drop the habit of excuses and take full responsibility for everything that happens, the sooner we’ll learn to find a way (or make a way) to get our tasks done, no matter what storm comes our way. No, it won’t stop the unexpected from happening, but it will teach you to seek out the lessons and the opportunities in every one of those unexpected distractions – find them, use them and make them your own.

Action Tip #4: Mine gold out of past “failures”

The good news here is that you don’t have to wait until another shit-storm hits you between the eyes. You can review past storms and identify the repeating patterns. One word of caution – don’t get sucked into the excuses you may have used in the past. Anytime you find yourself explaining away what happened, you’re down the wrong track again.

So go back over previous times when you had a messed up week. Take a closeup look and see if there was anything that, if you’d done it differently, you might have headed off the disaster. My grandaddy always said that hindsight is clearer than foresight by a damn sight, and while it’s no good for solving today’s problems, it’s really, really useful for keeping yesterday’s glitches from visiting you again.

One friend of mine had recurring back problems. Three or four times a year his lower back would “go out,” and each time it did, his whole schedule would come to a halt for a week or two. Finally, he noticed that his eating habits, compounded by a poor choice in chairs, might have been contributing to the problem. It took a while, but once he changed a few of his “indulgent” foods and got a new chair, the back problems became less frequent.

Another friend took a closer look at her repeating emotional crises. Once or twice a year she’d have a blowup with the guy she was dating or living with, they’d break up, then she’d have to wade through six or seven weeks of despondency and turmoil. Upon examination, she found some similar things she was doing with each of the men, and these contributed to the repeating relationship patterns.

Another looked at repeating health issues that interrupted his work routine every few months.

In every case, the cause was not “out there” somewhere… it was all self-generated. Sure, another person might do some toxic things, but unless they’re your Siamese twin, you’re free to dump them and find better.

So it’s a good idea to examine past failures and disappointments, learn from them, and change some of the things you’re doing. This lets you correct past mistakes before they can come back around the track and nail you yet again.

Good questions to ask yourself are:

• What can I stop doing to stop causing these repeating problems?
• What can I change so as to get different results?
• What can I proactively do to improve predictibility?
• Once I’m into a mess, what can I do next time to speed up recovery?

Remember, it’s no disgrace to get buried in shit from time to time. Happens to the best of us. But if you’re getting buried in the SAME shit every time, year after year, then that says you’re not learning much along the way. And we both know you’re smarter than that.

Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles