Change Management

While I've gone through Dale Carnegie training twice (once unofficially and once officially), I read his books before participating in the DC program.

The books made a lot of sense to me.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living presents the concept of realizing what things are within and what things are outside of your control, and only worrying about things that are within your control.

Right now in my life, I feel like a lot of things are outside of my control. It is a frustrating place to be because that frustration comes from worrying about things that I can't change.

"Don't worry about the things you can't change" is easier said than done. One of my struggles with that adage is that I usually spend a lot of time looking for something that I can affect within the situation.

What I find is that, as complicated as I try to make things, it's pretty easy to determine, within a given situation, what you have in your power. I can look up and down to find a loophole that lets me control everything, but, at the end of the day, the things I can control are those obvious items that I immediately identified when a situation presented itself. For better or worse, I'm still working on remembering that when new challenges cross my path!

I can't control everything, but there are certain things that I can do to keep my mind off of the things that I can't control and help me feel better about life in general.

I make my bed every morning. Clutter (and I feel unmade beds look cluttered) make me feel out of control in my personal environment. Keeping a tidy bed, and a tidy house, helps keep me in a positive mental space.

I do what I can do to the best of my ability. I don't have Carnegie's book with me, but I'm pretty sure that's one of the tenets of How to Stop Worrying. If the only thing that I can control is what I do, then I want to make sure I don't leave room for mistakes in those items.

Today, I'm grateful for social plans that helped keep me from ruminating on the things that I can't control, and good friends who take my mind off of bad situations.