Today started out being a pretty good day. I had a good night’s sleep but was woken up a bit early by a couple of helicopters zooming overhead and waking up some birds that made a bunch of noise. I had a good morning at home before heading into the office and I caught up with a friend for morning tea who I’d not seen for quite a long time.
Then something happened, by lunchtime I was in the absolute worst mood. I’m not really quite sure how I ended up there, but everyone and everything was annoying me.
This is pretty odd for me, I’m actually a pretty easy going sort of character. I’m rarely ever in a bad mood “just because”. Like any normal person something can set me off and put me in a foul mood, but to just be grumpy for no apparent reason really isn’t my style.
The worst part about it was that I suddenly was no longer productive. I sat around simmering, not able to focus on anything or complete any work. In fact, everything I looked at made me angrier.
I ended up in a meeting at 2pm to prepare for a client presentation tomorrow and I pretty much just sat there quietly seething. Anything that someone in the meeting said that I disagreed with caused me to grind my teeth to avoid saying something. I fiddled with my phone and my attention wandered.
As the meeting ended at around 3:30pm, one of the guys in the meeting that knows me reasonably well asked if I wasn’t happy with the presentation. I said to him I was just in a bad mood for some reason and it was easier to sit there and say very little.
I wandered back to my desk and got a Facebook Messenger message from my friend and Casual Marketer email subscriber, Alycia Edgar, about something she’d seen. I then mentioned to her in passing that I was in a bad mood. Alycia came up with a cracking line, “Sometimes the magic is as simple as being able to smile when you’re knee deep in shit.”
That made me laugh because that’s kind of how I felt. The day was going nowhere for me, I wasn’t getting anything done and I was just grumpy. I used that as an opportunity to take stock, realize I was knee deep in a crappy day, so I packed up and came home early.
When you run your own business, you have plenty of days like that. The days where it just seems like nothing goes your way, everything is harder than it needs to be and it feels like the universe is conspiring against you.
And some days, you’re just in a foul mood and it just feels like everything sucks.
Alycia was right, those are the days where you just need to be self-aware enough to look around, realize you’re knee deep in the poo and just smile.
By the time I got home, I’d listened to some Kanye West (I dislike the guy, but listening to his music on Spotify is strangely becoming a thing for me) and felt better. I also managed to get home before it was dark outside which was a nice change.
My plan was pretty simple, check out for the day, give myself a bit of a break mentally and chalk this day up as a write-off. When you’re a Casual Marketer building your own side hustle business, you can’t win every day and you’ve chosen to run a marathon rather than sprint, so taking a day off here and there when you’re not firing on all cylinders and in the right frame of mind is something you’re just going to have to do for yourself.
Tomorrow is going to be a better day, I’m sure of it.