CwL Ep76: A Bad Day

Hey, it’s Lisa Corduff. Welcome to the podcast where you can expect inspiring, raw, energising, and transformative conversations with people on the path of personal evolution. I’m here to really live my life. And if you are, too, these conversations are just for you. I’m really glad you’re here. Enjoy.

Hey. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Lisa. That’s me. Lately, I’ve really been kind of in conversation with myself. There’s been a lot of solo episodes, and that’s because I am recording this podcast at the moment obviously during our extended lockdown here in Melbourne, and I’ve got to record these puppies when I get a moment of silence and when I get a moment to myself, which is so rare, so rare. And so often you are probably hearing noises in the background, or I’m pressing pause because I’ve been interrupted for the 13th time in 11 minutes. Anyway, good times.

I hope that you are well. I thought I would record a little episode, this one won’t be super long, about this idea of having a bad day, because you see, what I’m all about is pulling myself up on the stories that I tell myself. I look for where I’m making meaning in my life, where perhaps there isn’t any. I’m always on the lookout for what’s disturbing my peace, because that’s something that I value highly.

And I’m also always sitting in a place of 100% responsibility for myself, for my whole entire life. And so if I start saying, whoa, that was a bad day, if I’m talking to myself like that at the end of the day, I’d think, okay, what happened to allow that to be a bad day? Do I really want to name that as a bad day? Is it really true, Lisa? Are we really going to call this just a full blown bad day? Can’t do anything about it. It was tragic. Put it in the bin.

Now, I’m not talking about those days where you have an accident or someone you love gets hurt. I’m not talking about the days in which you get terrible news. I’m not talking about the days in which you’re made redundant or things like that. I’m not talking about the day your divorce letter comes in. Not those days. Sometimes there’s really heavy, big, horrible days. I’m more talking about how, as women, as humans, we forget that we get to reset in literally any moment.

So I’m going to give you a really, really simple example, and I think I’ve shared this example before over the years in different contexts. And that is just the morning, even just calling it the morning rush. I hate that word, the morning rush. I don’t have a morning rush anymore. I used to, before I realised that my words literally decide my life. I speak my life into existence. So now it’s like the morning rhythm. A rhythm feels like it’s got a beat, like it sounds groovier, doesn’t it, than the morning rush?

Anyway, that’s a total other episode, but let’s just think about, I mean, for me in my personal circumstance, I’m getting three kids, usually, when we’re not having our three gillionth day in lockdown, out the door to school. And I’m getting them out to school. So there’s certain things that have to happen to make that happen. I may or may not have a child who still, still can find her ways to kind of take her time. Maybe not follow the beat, follow the rhythm that everyone else is following in terms of getting things done on time. Or, you know, there were times when, I mean a shoe gets lost, or someone actually needs something to be signed as we’re walking out the door, or I realise there’s no fruit for lunches.

Whatever it is, you know those things where you’re like, shoot, oh, this is so annoying. Everything was going fine, and now we’re going to be late, which means I’m going to be late to school. I have to get them a late slip. All I wanted was to just get to school on time so that I could feel settled before my 9:30 meeting. And now I’m going to be running late, and I didn’t do the preparation. So now I’m angry at myself for that. And where the hell is his shoe and why, why, why now am I sitting here, trying to get this double knot out? Why don’t they just open their shoelaces the night before as they’re taking their shoes off? Oh my gosh.

And then starts the, this is just, I am just going to, this is a terrible day. The day’s started off bad. And then so we’re sort of angry, maybe waiting in the line for a coffee. We get to a meeting unprepared, so we’re just kind of floundering and that makes us angry. And that sets the tone for the rest of the task we have to do today. We’re distracted. We feel like we’re behind. And at each step of the way, we’re perpetuating this ugh, I knew it was going to be a bad day. I knew it was going to be a terrible day. Ugh, I’m so annoyed that they put me in a bad mood this morning and that we got to school late.

You’ve got your equivalent to what I’m talking about. And then it’s like, oh, of course I forget to take anything out for dinner. So we’re racing to the shops, and we’re just angry about that. Someone forgets their belt to karate, and it just, on and on and on it goes. And we feel, we feel like we’re a victim to this bad day that we’ve just suddenly stepped into.

But what’s actually happened is that we have carried that same energy that was cultivated in the morning through the whole day, and we have not stopped to give ourselves a chance to just reset. What’s happened is your energy and attention has stayed on all the bad things. Energy is low, frazzled, and you’ve got no direction. It’s angry, frustrated, and there’s been no reset. And your attention is on the fact it’s a bad day. And so you create a bad day, when at any point you could have interrupted the flow of that. Literally every single moment, we get to take a beat and reset ourselves.

We have so much more choice than we realise. We let ourselves go. We fear. We honestly, I can see where I used to play the victim in my own life all the time. And what it came down to a lot of the time was, I mean, I was waking up unrested. I was literally tired from the start of my day because I wasn’t taking responsibility for getting enough sleep the night before. Of course, there’s always reasons why. Maybe kids are up through the night, or you’re not well and you’re not sleeping and you’re tired. All those sorts of things. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the, oh, I’ll just watch one more episode. I just binged Ted Lasso personally myself. Jumped on the bandwagon to that a little later than everyone else, I think. But you know, it’s those sorts of things.

And I blame a missing shoe for this cascading effect of a terrible day. And we take no responsibility for the fact a couple of deep breaths, a couple of, oh, is anyone dying here little moments of perspective can just kind of centre us and make us realise that perhaps this is actually us get getting frustrated over something that, you know what, sometimes these things happen. When you give away your peace, when you allow your energy to be scattered by the small things and it cascades, there’s actually something that you can do about it. Always in those moments, I’m asking myself, well, where’s your attention right now, Lisa? Where do you want it to be? What might actually be helpful here, Lisa? And I’m always asking myself, is this worth it?

And I know that in all of my programmes, women are like, how do you not get so triggered? How? How are you staying calm amongst all that? And it’s literally because I started to choose it. I started to be calm. And so yeah, of course it frustrates me when we are walking out the door and suddenly it’s like, “I need the permission slip for the excursion.” Or, “I had to wear a yellow something.” Of course it’s frustrating, but what, am I going to ruin my day because of it? No, I can take some deep breaths as I’m walking around the house, trying to find a yellow ribbon that doesn’t probably exist. Just take deep breaths, just really ask myself, is this worth hijacking my morning? Is it? Is it? It’s on me, because annoying stuff like that happens all the time.

So how much of your time are you spending just trigger happy, just [inaudible 00:11:25], or do you just take a moment to figure out, okay, how am I going to respond to this, if this has happened, but what am I going to make that mean? What am I going to make that mean? And then we can call on all of these things that all of us know. We all know the rules. We all know a bit about mindfulness. We know that we could literally take five deep breaths and completely reset. We know that Justin Timberlake was put on this earth to move us out of these moments. So was Taylor Dayne, and Roxette, for that matter. Whatever it is, you actually have the ability to shift your energy, to get literally your frequency back on track.

But you have to choose to do it. And I have a programme called The Mood Shift that actually walks you through step by step this exact process that you can go and do. But this is just really a reminder today that you have far more choice about whether you’ve had a bad day or not happen. I think we need to get better at this. Life is so precious. And I think for me, when Nick passed, he was 40. 40 years old. I’m sure that there’s someone in your circle or your extended circle, someone that you’ve heard about, we all know people who have died young, who literally aren’t here anymore to have these bad days. What would they say about getting to spend a day on earth?

What if you didn’t have that much more time? You might think that that’s a morbid thought, but I find it kind of activating. Would you spend your time triggered by the little things and calling a day bad? Or would you use your tools? Would you take a beat, reset, come back at things fresher, know that you have a choice about that? I love helping people with this stuff, I really do. And I am recording this because I literally just heard someone say, “It’s been a terrible day. It’s just one of those bad days.” And listen, I’m also not saying that I don’t have days where I get to the end and think, and full stop, return, turn off. Like, I am out. Whoa, what just happened there?

But you know what I never do? I never blame all the things going on around me. I look at myself and I ask myself, well, Lisa, you’re okay. What do you need right now? Do you need a little bit of rest? Do you need a little bit of quiet time? Do you need to be responsible for eating some really great food tomorrow? Do you need to get some movement happening, some exercise? Do you need to just do a little bit of Yoga with Adriene on YouTube? Where are you at? Where are you at? Because we don’t have to live like this. Shitty things are always going to happen, and we’re allowed to lose it. I’m allowed to feel angry, rageful. I’m allowed all of that. And I do.

But then I also just make sure that it doesn’t derail me totally if it doesn’t have to, if you know what I mean. There’s a difference. There’s a difference. Like, when you get into the practise also of fully feeling your feelings, it’s kind of hard to feel a feeling of even deep, deep grief for a full day. It’s just like, it’s hard.

I’d love to know what you think of this. If it resonates, if you took anything away from it, let me know. And if it’s helpful for you, of course, I love when people share the podcast, especially on Instagram, and you tag me and let me know. I always share those to my story. It’s fun. It’s fun to see. I sit here in my little bedroom studio, recording for you, and I certainly hope they hit the mark. Have a great day, even if it starts off bad. You can. See you.

Hey, before you go, I would love you to get registered for my free live upcoming workshop. I’m going to be diving deep into some of the surprising reasons that you have stayed so stuck. Listen, I am so excited about this, because we are going to be talking about all of the ways that we’ve actually been conditioned, programmed to put everybody else first, to never honour our own needs, to not listen to our bodies and what they need. I’m going to be shining a big light on a lot of the lies that we live out as truth as women, and you are going to leave this feeling really, really sure about exactly what you can do to break the cycle.

I don’t think it’s right that we keep perpetuating this cycle of self-sacrifice and putting everyone else first, to the detriment of our own needs. It doesn’t have to be like that. We can be nurturing. We can be loving. We can be all those things, and we can move forward on things that are important to us. I know it can be done, but we’ve got to move past a lot of this conditioning. So we’re going to make sure that happens. Get registered. I cannot wait to see you there. Please feel free to share this with friends, because I’ve been doing this work for eight years, and we are going to be tackling a lot of the things that I see women talking about time, after time, after time, getting to the bottom of it, all for free, for one hour. See you there.

Hey, if you are enjoying the conversation, then it would mean the world to me if you’d head over to iTunes and give us a rating and review. It really makes a difference. And it’s my intention to get as many of us involved in real conversations that really change the game as possible. Thanks so much for your help, and I’ll see you in the next episode.