You're Spending Your Best Hours in the Wrong Circle

She lies down at 10 at night. At 1 in the morning she's still running scenarios.

The rollout. The training schedule. Who's going to quit over this. 

Every one of those is getting the same grip, the same attention, and the same tightness in her chest including the ones that were decided 1,200 kilometres away by people whose table she wasn't invited to join.

In this episode, I share the story of my client Juanita, a branch manager who found out by email that her company was rolling out a new software system, four years after the last rollout went badly enough that people still talk about it. She'd been asked for her input early in the process and then later she spent a week working a full-time second job in her head on a decision that had already been made.

This episode explores what is happening when something big lands on us and we don't sort it. Instead, we carry the parts we could move today with exactly the same grip as the parts that were never ours to even influence let alone control, so the things we can actually change end up with whatever energy is left over. And the leaders who do this most are rarely the avoidant ones. They're the most conscientious people on the team, which is what makes it so hard to catch in yourself.

I get into the three beliefs underneath it, all of which sound completely reasonable from the inside, and the exercise I walk clients through with a sheet of paper and 15 minutes. 

In this episode:

• Why worry starts to feel like loyalty, and what it costs to keep the fire going as proof that you still care
• The difference between preparing for something and rehearsing it on a loop at 1 a.m. when you can't sleep
• Why confusing having a voice with having a vote is the most expensive mistake of the three, and how it disguises itself as accountability
• The three circles exercise, what Epictetus and Stephen Covey each contributed to it, and the third circle I added
• The question I now ask myself out loud when I catch myself spun up about something

This week's permission: You are allowed to put it down. Being aware of something and feeding it are two different things, and your best two hours belong to the work that's in your control.