The Lazy Genius Podcast - #204 - How to Rally on a Bad Day

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

We all have bad days and for different reasons. There’s something about being inside a bad day that feels like there’s no way out. You kind of just have to wait until the next day and start over. But if your bad day is living its best (or worst) life by breakfast, maybe waiting until tomorrow’s fresh start is not the ideal solution. None of us want bad days, but all of us have them. So let's Lazy Genius how to rally a bad day. Helpful Companion Links Get a copy of The Lazy Genius Way (or request it from your library!) to learn all about the LG principles. Our Lazy Genius of the Week is Chelsea K. Stanley with her Decide Once Chickfila reward points system. Download a transcript of this episode.   This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi there. You're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 204, How to Rally on a Bad Day. We all have bad days and for different reasons. And there's something about being inside a bad day that feels like there's no way out. You kind of just have to wait until the next day and start over. But if your bad day is living its best or worst life, I guess, by breakfast, maybe. maybe waiting until tomorrow's fresh start is just not ideal for you. None of us want bad days, but all of us have them. So how can we rally when we're in them? We can find a solution to anything with some combination of the 13 lazy genius principles in my book The Lazy Genius Way. One of the reasons that bad days need principles instead of specific solutions or tips is because the reason for your bad day and my bad day and even my bad day. And even my bad day, last week and my bad day this week compared to each other. Like those reasons are different. I might have a bad day because my hormones are like a little wackadoodle and they are impacting how I see myself in the world or how I

physically feel. A bad day can come from a bad moment, right? Sometimes I will say that I had a bad day when really the kids got in a big fight at four in the afternoon and I lost my temper. Or maybe I didn't lose my temper, but I felt super frustrated inside trying to keep it together because I feel like all I do is break up fights. And that singular moment now has colored the entire day. That day was fine. But one bad moment, it changed my perception of the whole thing. A bad day could be because of the bad news that came unexpectedly and is out of your control. It could be because you're in a really hard season and you haven't rested or gotten a break. And so that lack of sleep or margin or alone time or fun, it's just doing like a big old pile on on you and you break. You might even feel like you're in a string of

bad days. There are just a lot of reasons. And because there are a lot of reasons that are true from person to person, we cannot all apply the same band-aid. We can't have the same plan to rally. I can't even have the same plan to rally within my own life. Really? It depends on why I'm having a bad day, you know? That is why we love principles. That's why these 13 very, very, very versatile, tangible, actionable lenses can help you rally on a bad day, no matter how or why you need to rally. So I'm just going to walk through the 13 principles in kind of a particular order, actually, almost like a checklist for you. You can apply any principle in any order. But if you are in deep with me over here and you have read the book, you will notice that these principles are not in the

order, that they are in the book. But there's a reason for that in this topic. But it also doesn't matter all that much. Like, you do what you want. But that said, how to rally could be running through these principles, maybe in this order, until you land where you want to land. You might need one principle. You might need all 13. You do what matters to you. Okay. First, go in the right order. The right order for anything, really, is to, number one, name what matters. Number two, calm the crazy. and number three, trust yourself with what comes next. We're going to go in the right order for a bad day and how we rally. We're actually going to use the other principles to calm the crazy. But first, we need to name what matters. Depending on why you're having a bad day, this answer could be

different. What matters could be that you need space. You're having a bad day because you have no margin to be a person and you just cannot do it anymore. What could matter is some kind of of connection with your kids that beats your ability to control their behavior, right? It's more important than that. What could matter is staying true to your convictions when the rest of your team at work or your friend group or whatever. They seem to be going in a different direction than you really want to go. What could matter is that you don't have to do everything yourself today. You can let some things go. Start there as much as you can, as much as you can name it. What matters right now? Now, if you don't know, that's okay. Sometimes we're tired.

or mad or drained or distracted to figure it out. And that's okay. But if you can name it, if you can name what matters in that moment, try. Now the next part of going in the right order is to calm the crazy. And we're basically going to try and do that with most of the other principles. So first up in that effort is to start small. This is a very powerful principle because we are generally a people who try and build it big. You have a bad day. And your reaction is to revamp everything in your life. You think you need to optimize and mechanize everything so that this bad day does not happen again. And you know though deep down that that is not a thing. You do it anyway though. We do it. So take the pressure off of yourself to rally on a bad day

with big swings and big systems. Start small. You could rally instead with like a series of deep breaths with, I do this all the time with a walk to the mailbox slowly in the sunshine without my children behind me. Like I just take my time walking down the drive. It's not a long driveway, but I walk to the mailbox and I just breathe in and out slowly, walk slowly. I say kind things to myself. It's very, very simple, very small. You could rally with a song, with a fun drink, like a coffee or something, with a text of solidarity to a friend, with a prayer, with any number of very, very small. You could rally with a song. With a small things. So start small. If you find yourself getting out a new journal and listing out your entire life, it's not going to fix it. It will not prevent bad days from happening. And it will likely feel

it'll make your bad day almost feel worse because you're not going to fix it and you can't figure out how to do it because you're going too big. So start small. Next principle. Live in the season. A lot of our bad days are attributed to being in a difficult season of life with repetitive, frustrating, boring, challenging, fill in the blank days. And it is the accumulation of those days that makes every day, like, be at least a close call to being a bad one, right? We're like always on the break. So live in the season. Be honest about where you are, what is required of you right now, why you're in the season that you're in. Remember that it won't last forever and pay attention to what your season has to teach you. I had a stretch of time

last year where I felt like most days were bad days. I felt so beat up like I had lived three full weeks and it was only Tuesday. I was really sad and annoyed and I didn't like feeling that way, but I didn't give myself the space to notice my season. And when I did, when I realized, oh wait, we are in a season of everyone being home. And my not being a very patient virtual teacher, and also I'm launching a book and we can't go anywhere or see anyone. Like when I named that season, it was like a veil was lifted. I thought, oh, that's why I'm so sad.

Life is kind of sad right now. This is a hard season. But acknowledging it, being patient with that, naming that, it helped me. have kinder eyes to see the season for what it was and let it teach me let it teach me where I'm selfish where I'm still trying to be perfect what I love deeply because I miss it so much all kinds of lessons I would not have learned as well or as quickly if they weren't part of a hard season so live in the season naming that that perspective can really help in your efforts to rally on a bad day.

Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dacre Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. The next, we're going to put two together, and they all. are let people in and schedule rest. Let people in and schedule rest. Many bad days are because we are very tired and or we're keeping the hard stuff that we're experiencing to ourselves. We're not sharing

our lives with people because, I don't know, it's not important enough. We don't want to be in the way. Everyone is going through a hard time. So why should I get any extra treatment? You know, all kinds of thoughts that keep us to ourselves. And when we keep those thoughts to ourselves, guess what we do? We try harder, which makes us more tired. And it's very hard to schedule rest if we don't involve other people in it. So that's why I'm putting these two together. They're very connected, especially around rallying in a bad day. When you are in the middle of a bad day, let someone in text or vox or call a friend and just saying like, I'm having a bad day and I just need someone to know, right? And then leave it if you want. You don't have to say anymore. Just you don't have

to apologize. Just be honest and let people in. But also, you could ask a friend or spouse or sister or babysitter or your own kids that you need space, right? You can ask someone to help you schedule some rest. So you can like tap out of bedtime routine tonight and go for a walk instead or hang out with a friend or go to a bookstore or something. You can ask the grandparents if they can hang out with the kids for a few hours this weekend so that you can have some space to rest. Schedule rest and then let people in when you do it. Next up is decide once. All right, if you are in a season of bad days or if your bad days tend to have the same culprit, maybe like regular hormones or something, decide once what your bad day rally plan is going to be. So if you're in it deep and you're like, I don't want to do this

anymore. I don't care. You can know automatically because you have already decided that you are having spaghetti. You are watching a show at dinner. You're going outside. You're listening to music. You're skipping that chore. Anything in any combination. But decide once what your bad day rally plan is. Plan it based on what you need. Do you need to be off duty in parenting? Do you need a perspective reminder or like a shift in perspective? Do you need to be outside or alone or with a friend? Do you need to not make any more decisions? Don't decide once just on a whim arbitrarily. Really think about what you need if your bad days are sort of rooted in a consistent place. Think about what you need and then make a decision that is made to support what you need. Now let's say that your decide once is when I have a bad day

we're having spaghetti because it's a dinner you don't have to think about, right? But let's say you get to Friday of the week and you're about to eat spaghetti for the third time because you've had a string of some bad days. This is when you could bring in another principle or two. And I'm going to group together these three and these three in particular almost help prevent bad days from spiraling out of control. And those are house rules, essentialize, and build the right routines. Okay, house rules are things that you decide once, but they are meant to keep a lot of other madness from following in its wake. I give this example in the book about our after school time. So the kids would come home from school. They'd walk in the house, drop their book bags on the floor. Their shoes are strewn about. Annie would take things that were not hers from her brother's book bags. Important papers would get strewn about with the shoes. It was just like a whole thing. I would trip on stuff and it created a very, very bad day for.

me, that single hour would mentally ruin my whole day, at least by my own perception. When I realized that the main culprit was the book bags on the floor, we made a house rule to put book bags on the counter. No one trips on stuff. Stuff doesn't get unpacked on the floor. Annie does not take things that are not hers. It just works. It's been a house rule for years, and it still works. So think about something that you could put in place that might keep those dominoes of a bad day from knocking each other over. It's that thing when, you know, everything's going great and then all of a sudden your life is on fire and you're like, I don't know what happened. So find the place where the ingredients for the fire began and create a house rule that stops it from happening.

That is a great way to prevent a bad day that you would normally have. There's no need to rally because you've gotten in front of it a little bit, right? That same thing can happen with the other two principles I mentioned, building the right routine and essentializing. All right, so lazy genius routines, they focus on where you are going, not necessarily on the steps you take to get there. I want you to think about what you need to maybe help keep a bad day away, calm, plans, perspective, your dinner is prepped, whatever it can be. As you name that, you can take steps to make it happen, but the steps can change. The on-ramp itself, where you are going and what you need, though that doesn't really change. Like where you're going doesn't change. But there is flexibility in what

steps you take to help you get there, especially in preventing a bad day. The same is true for essentializing. Essentializing is basically getting rid of what does not support what matters to you. You name what matters. You get rid of what's in the way of that. And then you make sure you have what you do need. So, all right, so this is a very, this is a very niche example, but a helpful one, I hope. All right. So at my local Target shopping center, there is a three-way stop, not a four-way stop, a three-way stop. And it feels like no one knows how to use it. And it makes me crazy. Like, bad days are very much on their way, ladies and gentlemen, it is maddening to me. So a way that I can essentialize my trip home from Target is to exit a,

different way. I don't go to the three-way stop. I go around the back of the parking lot and I exit behind the fresh market and I skip the three-way stop, which means I skip the bad attitude that leads to a bad afternoon, which leads to my mentally having had a bad day. I'm removing what's getting in the way of my piece simply by turning a different direction out of the parking lot. I'm telling you that kind of simple choice, it makes a world of difference. So those three principles, house rules, essentialize and build the right routines, they can impact your bad day by making it less likely to happen. Now, if you're in the middle of a bad day, please make the magic question part of your rallying plan. The magic question is, what can you do now to make life easier later? What can you do

now? Assuming that your, you know, your bad day isn't going anywhere yet. What can you do now to make life easier later. The others we have not mentioned are batch it, which is more of a like a productivity time management principle. But if your bad day consistently comes from repetition that you hate, you can batch your task and see if it helps lessen the likelihood of a bad day. The same is true for the principle put everything in its place. This isn't just about your house and your stuff. But I've had bad days result from clutter before. When I put things in their place, it helps a lot. So maybe put your stuff away. And then finally, the final principle is to be kind to yourself. In all of this, be kind. We all have bad days. Be beating yourself up because you're having those

bad days. It does you know good. Be kind as you think through the other principles and try and come up with a plan that helps, but acknowledge that you're a person. You are not a robot. Your season, your hormones, your family, your job, the news you just got that you did not expect, the person who was unkind in the parking lot or on the internet, any of those things can create the volatile conditions for a bad day. And trying to program yourself to avoid those things and manage those things, it takes your humanity out of it. So be kind to yourself. as a person who is just trying to live a wholehearted life and is doing her best. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. And that is how to rally on a bad day. Now, before we go, let's celebrate our lazy genius of the week.

It is Chelsea K. Stanley who shared how I love this so much. She uses the principle of Decide once in a really fantastic way. She saves up her Chick-fil-A reward points and only uses them for special treats. after school. That is her decide once. Chick-fil-A reward points are for after-school treats. I love that so much. It's so simple. It's so fun. It's so clear on the purpose of the points. And then it creates like an automatic choice if you get ice stream after school. Do you have the points? Do you have the time? Great. Let's go. I love it so much. Thank you for listening and reading and being awesome. Chelsea. You're so great. Congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. All right. That is it for today, you guys. Thank you everyone for being here. And until next time,

be a genius about the things that matter, and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra. I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life? Because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it?

I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.