Sometimes In Business You Just Have Bad Days

4 Strategies to Improve These Bad Days

Zoom Out

Always one of the best ones.

A bad day is just that, whether it’s the worst day you’ll have this month, this quarter or even this year, it’s just still a bad day.

It’s easy to say move on, but to actually do it is tougher.

Exercise helps, but assuming that’s been done just zoom out.

Remember you had a worst day last year, but you probably don’t remember it now.

You had a worst day last quarter, you probably don’t remember that either, just zoom out.

Your likely doing better than you were a decade ago, if you reframe all the way back to that, your bad day now, your previous self would have traded everything for.

Reframe & Plan To Solve

My worst business days have led to the biggest opportunities

The single worst days on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis have led to plans being put in place to solve these issues so they never happen again.

As the saying goes, you need the pain to be greater than the pain of inaction, so sometimes because this pain is so high, on a yearly basis, this could actually be a net positive for you.

Find out what has specifically caused this single bad day, usually its from things breaking and going wrong, otherwise it would be a “normal” day.

But when things break and go wrong it’s usually down to process and system issues, so rebuilding these, even if they will take dozens or hundreds of hours to do, are actually a net benefit to your business.

Remember WHY you do it

As Elon Musk’s quote goes, business is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.

To anyone who hasn’t had those really bad days that probably seems excessive, to the people who’ve been in business long enough, they probably understand the sentiment.

Another helpful reframe here is to remember why you started.

This is similar to the initial idea of zooming out and thinking about where you’ve come from, but it’s also more about why you are doing this in the first place.

The “eating glass” problems of business are tough, but the working a 9-5 for a d*ckhead boss, are probably more difficult to live with the regret of.

Flow State

Probably the single best way to get out of a bad day is to work to improve it.

The chemicals that are released during flow state work are the exact opposite to those when we are death-spiralling, thinking about how because we lost our biggest client today we’re going to lose all the rest and then burn money and lose the house and the wife and the kids and the…. No…

Human nature really does f*ck us up this way, but when it comes to business bad days, don’t think yourself out of them, just get some relaxing music on, lo-fi, brain FM type deals and get to work.

Start by solving the process or system problem.

What would need to be done to ensure XYZ never happens again, and on top of that, how could I make it better. It’s already broken/not working, so now is the perfect time.