If you were to choose a five minute segment out of your day, which would you consider to be the most important and potentially life changing?
Would it be that extra five minutes in the morning when you wake up, when you hit that snooze button, giving you those extra minutes to put yourself in the right mood for the day? That would get your day off to a good start but wouldn’t necessarily change your life.
What
about that five minutes before you actually start work, those precious few
moments where you have another quick coffee and relax a little, getting
yourself into the right Mind-set to start your working day? That would keep you
in the right frame of mind to do your job efficiently, well at least until the
negativity kicks in – normally by mid-morning at the latest!
OK, so
how those lovely five minutes when you finally get home from work and you can
sit down and unwind with a glass of wine or an ice cold beer? Feels great,
doesn’t it? However five minutes is probably all you will get before your phone
rings and it’s your boss wanting you back in to sort some issue or other or a
client calls to reschedule an important appointment or maybe it’s the
babysitter calling to say they can’t come round because the birthday party they
thought was next week is actually this week and tonight. And so it goes on.
When you
think about it, choosing that important five minute segment can be extremely
difficult. You find it hard enough choosing five minutes to get some peace and
quiet never mind to decide which is most important.
Yet every
single one of us do indeed have a precious five minutes which we use every day.
Five minutes which we tend to use incorrectly, in a way which is detrimental to
our lives and not at all uplifting. These five minutes are probably the most
important in our lives because they set the tone for what comes next.
So when
are these life changing five minutes? I’ll give you a clue. Have a look at
these scenarios.
Scenario
1
You go to
bed at your usual time and you get off to sleep pretty quickly and you sleep
for your usual six, eight or however long hours and you wake up – cranky. You
just don’t feel right, you feel aggressive, you get out of the wrong side of
the bed, as the saying goes, nothing is going right and you end up late for
work because you were caught in an unexpected traffic jam and you day goes from
bad to worse. All that despite having a good night’s sleep and maybe a happy
dream or two.
Scenario
2
You go to
bed at your usual time and you get off to sleep pretty quickly and you sleep
for your usual six, eight or however long hours and you wake up – feeling
great! You jump out of bed ready to meet the day with a spring in your step.
You feel happiness well up inside as you sing in the shower. You get to work
early because you left home a few minutes earlier and avoided the traffic jams
and your boss praises you for your attitude and you get loads done throughout
the day.
Two
scenarios which start the same but with opposing endings. Why is that? What
reason could there be for such a difference in results?
Well
let’s wind the clock back those six or eight hours to a point just before you
go to sleep. For you see, the most important five minutes of your day are the
five minutes before you go to sleep. Why? What’s so important about those few
minutes?
What do
we normally do before we drift off to sleep? What do we think about just before
drifting away into Slumberland? One of two things normally: We either think of
what we have to do the next day or we review what we have done today. Am I
right?
Now, the
thing is, what do we focus on when we’re reviewing the day’s activities or
those to come? I’ll guarantee it will be all the negative stuff that’s happened
or you think will happen – actually we tend to mix both together into one Neggy
Nightcap!
To claim Scenario 2, why not Review the Day and instead of focusing on the He said-She said-and I'm going to do this, that, the other, focus on all the great and wonderful things that happened throughout the day. Don't have any in particular? Then make some up! Just don't focus on the Neggy Crap otherwise it's Scenario 1. Got it? 😉
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