Hello folks, Dr Ro here, Sunday afternoon and I don’t have a lot of time as I’m about to do a zoom call with a group of amazing people who have got very focused and want to change their lives.
I just wanted to take a few moments to share something with you and I am a big believer when things happen in my life because part of my world is teaching inspiring people, and hopefully giving some sense of wisdom at 50, 55 years of age.
That is dealing with adversity and managing to manage your emotional state and this is one of the things we talk about a lot in CWI, communicating with impact.
Let me paint a picture for you. I woke up this morning, torrential rain, our house is being refurbished and part of the house, a zinc roof with a valley gutter box gutter and we have about eight or nine oak trees around our house.
We’ve had a lot of tree foliage and what’s happened is the box gutter, although I cleaned it up about a week ago, has filled up with leaves again and during the night because I got a trap for the leaves the water has backed up, the water is filled up, and there’s an overlap with zinc.
Normally the water comes here but it is backed right up to here. It’s gone up and over, and we’ve got a rather expensive set of floors and I woke up to seeing part of the floor flooded.
You can imagine my stomach goes through the floor.
I’ve literally got an hour to get to my office to get set up to do a check in with my team, the AV, the technical. We’ve got towels there’s water pissing down and I go up barefoot onto the zinc roof and climb out, I look down, I’m pulling leaves out as it does appear to have backed up and all this is happening in the early hours of Sunday morning with the rain coming down and I’m trying to get myself ready.
There is a lot of emotion going on. My kids are like what’s going on daddy, my other half is downstairs with towels. The point I want to make is it so easy in these situations to allow the emotion of that situation, we’re talking about flooring which took probably six weeks longer to put down because we had issues with Covid, the drying of the word. The guy who put the floor up was amazing now we’ve got part of it flooded as you know with wood it expands, it can pop and my brain is going at 100 miles an hour and all I can think about is solution.
Clear the leaves, pull out the filter, get the leaves flowing and the water flowing off, bring that level down, get the towel and try to mop it. Then we find the water is channelled along the full length. It’s like 10 or 15 m lounge length, travelled down to a part of the wall and found itself into the kitchen now. I get a photograph sent to me when I get to the office here from my fiancé saying guess what, the water’s come through the kitchen.
Now my brain is still in that mode, but I’ve got 100 people to deliver to in front of me as an audience.
I’ve got to get my switch flipped as quickly as possible. This is what I teach people to do when teaching people to speak and to communicate with impact. I get people say I’m really shit at presentations and the meeting didn’t go well, why? Was it a bad meeting?
No, this thing happened before the meeting and I couldn’t concentrate, but the problem is when you are at any moment, whether it’s a business meeting, whether you’re having an intimate meeting somebody, doing a coaching call, online presentation to 100 people or more.
They’re sitting there watching me if I just spend the day with my head still back with the flood going on at home. I’m not serving the people that are there. My four tips on how to deal with this. The first thing you’ve got to do in any situation that you have to accept, doesn’t matter how dire the situation is. In this case it wasn’t life-threatening, but you’ve got to remember we spent over a year renovating the house. We spent two years planning.
Covid delayed it two months and then suddenly it got ruined like that. So yes, it was frustrating and upsetting, but I had to park it. The first thing you do is accept it, don’t see it worse than it is don’t see it better than it is. There’s nothing I can do right now, clear the leaves, accept it, no builders around. I sent a message to my builder and another friend of mine who is an architect was involved at the time, he reached out to the zinc company.
We have somebody coming tomorrow. We’ve done everything we could at this moment in time.
Any situation arises in the midst of a difficult challenge, but you have another thing you’ve got to do first thing to do is accept it as is. If you keep focusing, allowing it to explode into your brain it will literally hijack every thought you’ve got then you’ve got to park it. I can’t be up talking to my audience and at the same time thinking what I do? I was thinking that prior to but as soon as I made the decision to park it I have no control at that moment.
If you’re going to a meeting, doing a presentation whatever it is you’re doing, promoting, selling, doing a presentation online you have to park it in a compartment over here which says come back later.
Then you shift your focus. Where do you shift the focus to?
Back to whoever you are delivering to. You have to be mindful in the moment and have to be present with them and the way I did that, a great way to do that is to acknowledge the situation and then move on from it. I actually opened this morning and I said to the audience I just want to let you know I’ve come from a really challenging situation and I did it in about 15 to 20 seconds. Parked it, acknowledged it, moved on.
Now you put your focus back on the person you’re with. If you’ve got an audience meeting or talking to an angel if you keep talking to them and then you go on like this and you keep checking your phone they are going to go, I’m with you but you’re not with me and you’ve got to make them feel important.
So yes, you’ve got stuff going on, or you cancel the meeting and you call it off. That wasn’t an option for me.
I made a decision that wasn’t important enough over these 100 people there and that was not acceptable for me. I’ve made a decision to serve them. That was my choice and I wanted to serve those people, so you make your cause, your focus bigger than the problem you’ve got in that moment, not to say the problem is not big. Don’t belittle it, but we’ve parked it, shrink it down, compartmentalise it.
Then you’ve got to change your physiology. What I did was before I came around, I spoke to my crew, I started jiggling up and down. It’s my thing. Move around, stretch, get my energy up.
Get your vibration up, shift my focus. It’s about making sure that your body is now engaged with the message you want to deliver.
You absolutely make your body in line with the message you want to deliver. That is part of the CWI process.
Have a lovely evening.
Thank you for joining me.
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