Don’t Live in the Five Minutes
Hey Friend,
Reflecting on the week takes me to all kinds of places. My recall of conversations, experiences, feelings, thoughts, people - adds up to a richly dynamic life. Both inner and outer, this Saturday morning pause, gives me time to reconsider, calibrate and reinterpret scenario's, that in the moment, I'm not afforded that luxury. Reconsidering life is a gift.
I was in Atlanta this week for a leadership team facilitation. We were scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Thursday morning the news came out about Friday's reduction of flights. Out of the nine people in the room, only two of them were local. So there was a scurry to switch flights for later that day. I decided not to because I thought it would be an adventure on Friday.
However, as the day progressed and we figured out our timing for our now-virtual Friday meeting, me remaining there wouldn't work. So I booked an 11pm flight for that night. The airport was full and active.
We started boarding at 10:30p. After the first two zones were boarded, they stopped. They announced that our pilots had to go to another flight and that we'd have to wait for new pilots to arrive. It could be 2-3 hours. The collective punch-in-the-gut was audible. Everyone deplaned. As I was standing in disbelief, bombarded by thoughts, two pilots walked up and said "we're your pilots." The surprise and delight was palpable.
FIVE MINUTES
From the time everyone got off the plane until the pilots arrived was about five minutes. However, in those 300 seconds, a swirl of emotions coursed through my body. Dread, disappointment, frustration, all hopped up to my frontal lobe and unleashed a flurry of negativity. I'm a positive guy. I like the unexpected. I'm up for travel adventures. However, because I needed to deliver a virtual presentation in 11 hours, the thought of getting in at 5am tormented me.
Then... it was over. Relief. Exhilaration. Joy. Gratitude. I couldn't control any of it. It all just happened to me. It was so brief, yet intense. How many of us live our entire day in that Five-Minute-Space? Raging emotions of all sorts dictated by external forces. The tenderness of feelings leave us easily triggered by these momentary scenarios. They end, but the distress remains.
MINDSHIFT
What if when your emotions start escalating you gave yourself a five minute reprieve and see if they might dissapate a bit?
COMPRESSION
Flying has been a great place to practice compressing my internal dialogue. I'm not the most patient of people and often find the voice inside my head helping others move more quickly. When they don't adhere to my mental effort to exert the force on them, I get to determine how to release the pent-up goodwill I've been "offering". People are slow.
I'm cognizant of practicing patience. It's never natural. As with all the external world it's the story we tell ourselves in real-time internally that dictates the emotions that burst forth or flow steadily. One of my most useful questions is "What can you do about it?" Most of the time the answer is "nothing" which gives me a base to wrangle my emotions in.
MINDSHIFT
What would it take for you to step outside of yourself and ask "What story am I telling myself about this situation or person? Is there an alternative available that enables me to keep my emotions in check?"
CONSIDERATION
I'm also not naturally empathic. For over 30 years I've accessed the Covey story about the guy on the train whose kids were running wild. Reality tends to have more nuance than our mind stories, which have us as the preeminent figure. When we're stuck in that Five-Minute-Zone of emotional hijacking, it's difficult to consider others. It's useful to have "what about me?" as a prompt for a self-awareness check. When I think that thought, I know it's time for me to look outward.
Comparison is useful when we have the maturity to recognize others pain.
I can look around the airport and see parents with young kids, couples needing to get home, business people in the turmoil of big decisions and realize my virtual meeting can happen from anywhere. When we think life is so unfair and things are so hard, I promise you, we can find many, many others who have much greater difficulties and sadder stories. Compare wisely.
SHIFTING
I hope this week if you find yourself in the Five-Minute-Funk for a minute or hours, you consciously step back and recalibrate your mind story to produce gratitude. If you can't, inserting the philosophy "life is happening for me" creates a curiosity about how something so painful could be used for our future good. Take your mind there.
#ShiftAway
