Don’t Let a Bad Five Minutes Ruin Your Day: The Power of Compartmentalizing

Don't let five minutes of a bad situation experience ruin the rest of your day. Have you ever had somebody tell you that it looks like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed? How many of us love that comment? Hate it. Hate it. I hate when people say that. But there is some validity to exploring the comment in and of itself in conjunction with what Jill just said. Maybe we had a bad morning, maybe we're frazzled, maybe the car didn't start. Whatever the situation is, are we letting that five minutes that was bad ruin the entire rest of our day?

And are we showing up that way? Is that how our energy is being projected onto the people we come across? Coworkers, family members, friends, whatever it is for that person to make that comment, you guys are going to learn. Watching a lot of our videos and our content, we are advocates for developing self awareness. Self awareness is the building block. It is the foundation for how you know yourself. So five minutes. Five minutes. Yes, we've all been there. And maybe five minutes is actually an hour.

It might be a little bit longer than five minutes, but it is part of knowing your self awareness around saying, man, this. Me getting a flat tire totally inconvenienced me having to go to work, and then I was late for a meeting and then now I have to clean up the mess of my morning. But it is your job to know that thing doesn't have to ruin the rest of everything that's right in front of you. Because if you don't have awareness around it, you're gonna miss the magic. It's gonna bulldoze your entire day.

You're gonna miss magic in your day. Well, and how many of us let that five minutes or hour, whatever it is, not only ruin our day, but our week, sometimes our months, our months turn into years and we're still bitter and p***** off about that thing that happened back in 1992. Right? So if we're not self aware, instead of us being able to control the thing, the thing starts to control us. And that's a really scary notion. So how we love to break it down. I apologize in advance if you are not a fan of sports, but you can find yourself in the analogy, right?

Let's just take a football game. There's four quarters to a football game as well as a halftime. So really there's five different segments of a football game. If teams have a poor performance in the first quarter, that 1st 15 minutes of a football game, and they let that determine how they show up for the rest of the game, they got three more quarters to turn it around, as well as a halftime to take a break, take a breather, really shove what happened in the first quarter aside and come out as their best in the second half.

Then there would be no underdog stories, there would be no Cinderella stories. There would be no amazing comebacks to talk about. So we want you to look at your life in quarters or halves, maybe the first quarter of your day down the drain. We're going to chalk it up. We're going to say that was a complete and total loss. But I don't want Q one to ruin Q two, three and four. So how do I go about compartmentalizing what happened here, analyzing it, figuring out maybe where I went wrong and how I could do better in two, three and four and letting it go?

Here's a quick example. Something that I have been, I've been rumbling with. So my husband and I got into a little bit of a spat. And trust me, as much as I wanted to move on from that, it lingered. And what I know that brings me a lot of joy is the work that I do. And I know that if I were to bring my yuck into my work, I wouldn't be showing up as my best self. So what I've learned is I need to check my baggage at the door so I don't bring the suitcase of the crap into what it is that I have next.

And guess what? Me finding joy in stuff that fills me up, whether that's my family or my job. In this example, it's my job. I got to, like, let it go. I was like, wait a second. Am I still mad at him? Mood booster. Yes. Boop, boop, boop. So then I'm like, ah, that's all I needed. I needed to compartmentalize that in order for me to get a boost of what I needed so that I can go back and revisit the conversation that we needed to have. That also brings her contrast. Right. How big of a deal was what happened?

And I have no idea what happened. But because she got to experience joy in one part of her life, she also got to ask herself the question on, of how important it was. So the, the concept for me that comes to mind from that example is if it's not going to matter in five minutes, then why are you letting it matter in five years? And so many of us are so good at hanging on to things and situations that it winds up changing our whole dynamic. Realistically, it stops becoming something that happened.

It starts becoming a mood and then a temperament and then a personality, right? Like, it becomes, oh, Mary's just moody now. I don't want to be known as Moody Mary because of a situation that threw me off five years prior and that put her in a mood five years ago. No. So our question to you is, how can you start letting go of certain things so they don't have a hold on the rest of your day, week, month, year, life? Because it's not worth it to let your energy be drained. And like Jill pointed out, it's not fair to who we come in contact with to let that toxicity spill all over them when they had absolutely nothing to do with the situation prior to that.

So where can you let go? Where can you compartmentalize? And I'm not saying that what happened didn't matter. You can absolutely revisit it. Back to the football analogy. Do you think they watch tape on where they went wrong? What's the lesson in that? How do they get better from that? I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I'm not saying you should never think about it again, but bring it up at a time that makes sense for you to analyze it, look back on it, and make the changes that you need to make for that thing, either to a not happen again or for that thing not to totally throw you off in the same way ever again.

I love that you said to revisit it when you're not feeling red or seeing red, when you're emotional. When you are emotional in those five minutes, you need time to step away, to breathe, and to come back into equilibrium. Librium. So that you're not coming from a place of angst and frustration. Right. Or the most important thing, please do not suppress and push down. You have to revisit in order to feel complete. So that's your challenge. I'm. Wait. Feel complete. So we'll see you on the next video.