I think we all have bad days. But as I start to get a little bit of grey hair and reflect back on my life and career — and on when I’ve really been thriving and achieving — it’s becoming more and more evident that there are some things I do consistently that allow me to be on my best game more often than not.
This isn’t a definitive list, but here are the eight things. They might be helpful to you. And I think it’s a nice way to think about life holistically: not just spiritually, or physically, or financially, or mentally, but a little bit of all of that, thrown in with a little bit of Eastern Zen philosophy for good measure.
Number one, I would say, is the foundational trio: what you put in your body, what you let your mind rest on, and how we interact with others. These three interdependent things have what I call consequential karma. I don’t know — it might be a three-hour, three-day or three-month rule, but whatever we do to our body, our mind, and how we interact with others always comes and gives us a dividend or a payback a little while later.
And of course I’m not going to get into this post about what you should and shouldn’t do for food. But the more I get older, the more I start to think really carefully about the physical impact of what I consume: the things I know that help me have great days, and the things I know — and science will back — will definitely, without any doubt, support me to have a day where I probably won’t feel good, perform well, and deliver value to the world. For example, I can’t tolerate alcohol anymore, not a drop of it. But I can have one or two coffees on the weekend. Small example, but you’ll have your own bargains you’ll make with yourself about food, whether it’s chocolate, beer or pizza. But it’ll have a consequence. It’ll affect how you feel, how you think and how you perform.
The other practice, of course, is something I’m going to call stillness, or reflective practice. Goodness me, today everyone’s on the go — push, push. How are you going? “Oh, I’m back to back in meetings.” Having reflective space is probably something that needs to be protected, like a small plant growing in the corner of your life. Without it being watered and nurtured and looked after, our ability to look down on your life and see it as a system becomes more and more compromised — meaning you’re stuck in the same loops and the same habits, without any opportunity to have a gap between the stimulus that comes into your life and the response that you have to it. Reflective, meditative and Zen practices have a lot to do to support you on this. For me, I’ve found how this works in terms of how I meditate, when I meditate, how frequently I do it, and what that means for me throughout my day. You’ll find your own way, but I encourage you to consider some sort of reflective practice. It could be as simple as writing a diary, or getting out into nature.
Lastly, the third of my trio: it’s the interactions we have with other people. Of course, how we show up and the energy and mood we have will affect how we show up to interact with other people. But I think we need to understand a little bit more around our style, or personality, and what we are looking to get from it when we interact with others. Some people need validation. Other people give energy in social settings; some people take energy. Some people reflect and are analytical; other people like to drive things forward, tick off tasks and get things done. There’s no right or wrong here. It’s just understanding how you work with and through other people to get things done.
Which brings me to the next point: understanding your own personality. For years I went through thinking people had it in for me. It led to me being quite sad and down and quite moody a lot of the time, when I just thought there were all of these — in inverted commas — evil, nasty people who had it in for me. They were just being who they were. As I’ve got older, I’ve reflected and understood that a personality that doesn’t necessarily combine well with mine doesn’t make them wrong and me right. It just makes us different. And the more time I spent understanding myself and my own personality, the deeper my ability to understand and have empathy for others — and I didn’t take things so personally anymore. So I encourage you to look at personality traits, and all those interesting tests you can take, to understand who you are and how you interact with the world and other people. You’ll gather data over time and draw a rich picture of who you are, how you show up, and who this person you call yourself actually is.
That gathering of data doesn’t stop at personality. Nowadays, if you’re interested in having positive, high-performance days, good mood and more up and energised experiences — and you want to manage the down and mitigate the chances of you having rough, really difficult days — I think collecting data is really, really important. And there’s been some really interesting research that’s come out over the last decade or so around leading indicators that tell you that your body is not in good shape, or you’re getting sick, or there are some things happening with you physiologically that you need to just be careful about and understand that you’re possibly going to be in for a bit of a spell where rest is more indicated than expending energy. Wearables that give you data on your heart rate, your sleep and all sorts of other indicators about the physical self can’t be ignored anymore. I think, as a tool used in moderation and intelligently, there’s no better way to validate how you’re feeling subjectively with what the data is telling you objectively. One example is heart rate variability: the time it takes between your heartbeats varies normally. The higher it is, the more you’re able to cope with the stresses of life, and the more chance you’re going to have a great day and be able to expend energy towards the achievement of your goals. There are many more indicators. I encourage you to consider this, even if you’re an anti-technology person.
I want to finish this post with something I’ve come to do when I’m not having a good day. First of all, I think it’s super important to know that you’re not having a good day. Life goes up and down. That’s normal. But if we look at what Buddhism teaches us about the Middle Way and impermanence, I think that we have a lot to consider.
I want to take you through a metaphor I quite often use. It’s about the mountain and the weather. A lot of what I try to do with myself, and when I’m coaching others, is to talk about us as a nice steady mountain. The weather is swirling above our head. Sometimes we have cloudy days, sometimes thunderstorms and lightning, sometimes sunny skies — but the mountain sits strong and stable, as mountains do. So when there’s bad weather, stormy skies, difficult times: just be a mountain. Accept it. Don’t try to get away or change it. Just be with it. The storm will pass. Impermanence is a universal truth. This too shall pass. The weather will clear, and the mountain will be there, watching the clouds disperse and the sunny skies open up.