When to Tell Your Feelings to SDASU (Read Time: 3 min.)

I was languishing in self-pity yesterday.  That's right.  I threw a HUGE pity party... all in my honor.  I went through the gamut of emotions from anger to irritation to stress to sadness to the pouty 11 year old saying "This is SO UNFAIR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" 

And then I took a nap... And then I got up... And then I looked in the mirror and said to myself, "Now what?"

So I did what I'd tell any of my coaching clients to do.  I looked myself in the eye, stood up straight, and said to how I was feeling (silently, clearly and forcefully):

SDASU

In other words,

Sit Down And Shut Up!

Don't get me wrong.  Feelings are important but they aren't everything.  Everybody says (including me), "You have to feel your feelings to heal them."  But once you've felt them once, do you need several encore performances?  No you don't.  In fact, that can be more of a hindrance to you getting to where you want to go than anything else.

At the end of the day, there are moments where you're going to throw a pity party.  My rule of thumb about pity parties is this: If you're going to throw one, go all out.  Give yourself 24 hours to cry and then get up.  That's what I did yesterday and here's what I'm doing today:

I'm taking a 'whatever it takes' attitude.

Which boils down believing 3 things and doing 3 other things:

BELIEFS:
1) It CAN be done.
2) I CAN do it.
3) There are AT LEAST a thousand ways to get this done.  I only need the first one that works.

ACTIONS:
1) Put my WHOLE mind into the PRESENT action.
2) Give ALL that I have to ALL that I do.
3) Stay focused on the end as I work towards it (in other words, ignore the temporary, current circumstances; they will change and you'll still be standing).

How's that for giving my feelings a boost?  Now I feel energized, strong, and I'm no longer in pity party mode.  Try it.  It works...