Sometimes, as much as you plan, as much as you pray, as much as you visualize, things don’t go as planned.
We’ve gotten so accustomed to this in the early stages of building our vision here on Team LYV that my amazing assistant Sarah Topel coined this phrase…”Living in the Pivot.” (Thank you, Sarah, and no doubt, we will be adding that to our famous collection of LYV quotes.)
But with my world especially right now and maybe yours too, there is a greater need for agility, surrender, trust, and proper discernment that helps bring calm to chaos, not the other way around.
Times of question and uncertainty (which include, but are not limited to, unforeseen challenges) required transitions and even the appearance of dreams. It is easy to let the amygdala send fear, overwhelm, negativity, or criticism to your message center. And in those moments, we will need to make decisions. Those decisions are about how to handle our own emotions first. How do we settle our amygdala to give authority back to the prefrontal cortex or executive function part of the brain? If we make decisions without first settling in the presence of A LOT of emotion, it can lead to years of regret.
So what to do when you feel pressure to make an important decision but more emotion swirling that may threaten good decision-making?
Some would say wait.
That is one strategy, but sometimes, hesitation is more costly. So what to do when you feel emotion and time pressure?
It would seem to me that if you have come to that place where life requires YOU to be able to make good decisions in the presence of time pressure, you may need a new strategy other than waiting. That is what leaders must learn.
Otherwise, you will just be at the mercy of other external circumstances tossing you around by your emotional responses.
So what helps to get comfortable with the uncomfortable? To really LIVE IN the pivot?
1. Stop fighting it – waste of energy.
2. Give yourself permission to be sad or grieve for a reasonable and set amount of time. (Embrace your own vulnerability.)
3. Anchor or ground into something unchanging – (God to me).
4. Be willing to see the shift as something ‘better’ coming your way. (Believe it or not, there really may be something better ahead that couldn’t happen unless you let go of what you know or planned.)
5. Start looking for validation of the ‘better’. (It won’t appear unless you are open to it.)
6. List where you see ‘the better’ starting to emerge already.
In all transparency, I am personally going through a hard time right now. I know it may not look like it from social media, but every day, there are blessings and challenges that coexist. And in case you didn’t know, I suffer at times from depression, anxiety, and even panic attacks. I have to be vigilant with my self-care to keep it far from me, but there are times in life when a challenge comes to me and I must rise to it. The steps above are my personal process that I am working on today!
1. I have accepted it.
2. I am grieving it.
3. I am grounding myself by flooding myself with promises and guarantees of God.
4. I am walking by faith seeing in my mind’s eye the possible ‘better’.
5. I have begun to see moments of the ‘better’.
6. I am collecting evidence (texts, messages, etc.) of the ‘better’ showing up.
So here’s to living in the pivot.
Not every day will be your favorite. What’s your plan for that too?
Having a plan for the challenges makes the plans for the blessings much more likely to see them realized.
I suppose you could call that ‘risk management’, or in our case, ‘Living in the Pivot‘.
What do you need to do differently to make decisions YOU will not regret in times you feel enormous pressure?
We are here for you with our mental training programs that pay big dividends to those who continue to do the work. Let us know how we can help.
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