Most of the difficult conversations I have get dealt with the evening before they happen.
I do the hard part at my desk, at the end of the working day, before I’ve switched off. By the time the conversation comes round, I’ve already had it once in my head.
Marcus Aurelius had his own version of this, nearly two thousand years ago. Before he’d met anyone, he started his morning by telling himself exactly who he was likely to meet:
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Two, translated by George Long (1862)
It sounds gloomy until you see what he’s doing with it. He’s deciding how he’ll respond before anyone gets the chance to wind him up, so a rude email or a sulky meeting can’t take his day off him.
Pick your thoughts like you pick your clothes
In Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert passes on a piece of advice from a friend she makes in India. I’ve never forgotten it:
You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love
She’s right. You wouldn’t walk out of the door in whatever happened to be lying on the bedroom floor. Yet it’s easy to let the first email of the morning pick your mood for you.
Start your day the night before
That’s why I like to start my day the night before. At the end of my working day, before I settle into my evening, I look at what I know I’ve got to deal with tomorrow. Which conversations are likely to come up, and how do I need to show up for them?
If there’s research to do, I do it then. I’ll read back through my notes from the last time I spoke to someone, so I’m not walking in cold. It doesn’t take long, and it buys me a little more time to think things through before the moment arrives.
That’s Marcus’s morning rehearsal, moved to the evening before. The awkward conversation still happens. It just doesn’t ambush you.
Right at the very end of the day, I do one more thing. I write down what I’ve been grateful for in the day I’ve had. Finding that bit of gratitude before sleep helps me wake up in a better emotional state, ready for whatever’s coming.
Keep the promises nobody else heard
The other half of it is how you treat the commitments you make to yourself. If I decide I’m getting up for the gym, or for a walk, I try my best to do it.
I’m not perfect at it. Some mornings I wake up too tired and change what I’d planned. When that happens I still do something, even if it’s less than I intended, so the promise is at least partly kept.
Do the difficult thing first
All of this comes down to choosing your energy, and the simplest way I know to do that is to find the things you know will be difficult and do them first.
Anything hard that’s waiting for you takes up space in your mind until it’s done. It sits there all morning, quietly pulling your attention away from everything else. The quicker you free up that space, the better you can focus on the rest.
If the getting up is the hard part for you, I wrote about Marcus and his unwilling mornings in Getting Up When You Don’t Want To.
And once the difficult one’s done, the rest of the day is yours.
