First published 8 March 2021 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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Nigel opened episode 120 by forgetting the name of the show. A hundred and twenty episodes in. So I took over the intro. It couldn't have been a better lead-in, because the topic I'd brought was overthinking. That habit of making up a story in your head and then spending hours colouring it in, usually with a monster or two in there.
Nigel had a fresh example. He was presenting to a group in Australia at 6.15 in the morning when his internet went down. Then he shut Zoom and kicked everyone out of his own meeting. The old Nigel would have been straight into "how stupid am I?" This time he set it up again on his phone, could only see four faces, and carried on. Two dodgy minutes out of 90. At the end he said anyone could go and he'd stay on for a bit. Nobody left.
Mine was the phone call that doesn't come. You're expecting a client to ring, they don't, so you decide the work's off and fill the dates you were holding. A few days later they call with a perfectly good reason and want to confirm. Now you've got two things in the diary. I've done that. These days I give it more breathing space before I fill in the blanks.
Nigel's wife is a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and when she worked with young kids at home she'd lay out little monsters and action figures and ask which one an emotion looked like. Nobody ever picked the smiley Ronald McDonald face. It was always the green monster or a dark cloud.
His answer to it is WTT. What's the truth? You're stuck on the M25. That's it. But we spend 18 minutes dreading the call, and when we finally ring the client just says okay. Much like Nigel did that morning when I said I might need ten minutes. A friend of mine is forever asking "does it really matter?" and I like holding things up against a year from now. I finished on a line I read once (no idea who said it first). Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. There was nobody there.
What stayed with me
- When a client doesn't ring when you expected, don't give their dates away on a guess. Give it a few days.
- Ask yourself WTT. What's the truth right now? Stuck in traffic is just stuck in traffic.
- If it won't matter a year from now, let go of it now.
- When something goes wrong, tell people quickly. Most of them just say okay.
The stories that we tell ourselves dictate the life that we lead.
Nigel Risner
There have been big chunks of my life where I kinda lived somewhere between fantasy and catastrophe. Now reality was always in the middle, but that's the bit I didn't wanna look at.
Neil Martin
