Battle Fatigue 😞

A lot of us are weary of "the new normal." Summer travel plans were cancelled. The kids are stir crazy and want to be with their friends. Parents are trying to juggle work, home life, distance learning... it's a lot for everyone.

Key topics:

✔️ How can we cultivate happiness even in dour times?
✔️ If something could be an email or a phone call, please don't require everyone to get on camera just so you can use Zoom.
✔️ Gratitude is so important, even when we aren't feeling our best.
✔️ Please don't send me LinkedIn spam asking if I am "well amidst the current climes."
✔️ We all have a certain PSI; when you've reached your pressure limit, it's time to rest.



Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Transcript

Unknown Speaker : 0:00

Today I want to talk about battle fatigue and how we can try to find happiness even an unhappy times, or less than ideal circumstances. I'm actually recording this episode from my own meditation nook because I needed to get away from it all for a little while. I just had an overwhelming need for some solitude, quiet time and the ability to hear myself think I mean, I am not an avid news watcher. If you want to feel absolutely horrible about everything, watch the news for a little while and you miss mission will be accomplished. It's kind of like googling a symptom on Web MD. No matter what the issue is that you're having, they're going to tell you that you're about to die. So it's like just just don't even go there because you're not going to have a good experience with it. I've talked to several people over the past few weeks and there seems to be a sort of collective funk that we've all been in hearing a lot of people say I'm tired of the new normal. Like I don't want to go back to the gym and wear a face mask and smother to death. I understand public health. I'm not saying I want to go out and be a big health risk to other people. I just don't want to smother while I'm working out. The kids are driving me crazy. They're they're stir crazy they want out of the house. They're acting like hooligans, I'm tired of trying to be a parent, hold down my job and work remotely and try to do homeschooling with them with all the distance learning screw the distance learning, I'm ready for them to go back to school. Like I get it, I totally do. At some point, you just grow weary, you get that battle fatigue of having to deal with this problem that you know, at the front end of it, it seemed like it was only going to be for a few weeks and then it's just drag on and it it only seems to be getting more and more restrictive. As the weeks go by. I myself have tremendous Zoom fatigue. To me, it's like if I have to sit through one more video conference that could have been a telephone call or an email, I'm just gonna rip my hair out. And it's you see it all the time on LinkedIn. Hey, let's hop on a quick zoom call. Absolutely not. You know, if we need to talk, you can call me on the telephone. You remember that thing that used to be so keen for your business? Think about those names that like every salesperson posted where it's like, got a piece of paper taped to the back of the phone and it says, pick me up, I make you money. Now all of a sudden, everyone's forgotten the telephone and they just want to harass everybody over zoom. And I'm like, No, if there's anything good that we can say about having to be cloistered away at the house all the time. At least we're able to sit in our pajamas or athletic clothes. We don't have to worry about you know, if you're if you're the type of person that feels like Well, I don't want to just roll out of bed with crazy bed hair and get on a camera for all the world to see, you have to comb your hair and put on makeup and look a certain type of way. So at least being at home, you get to miss out on all of that jazz. But yet there's people that are like, all geeked up on wanting to be on zoom all the freaking time. And it's so unnecessary. You I've had a couple of potential consulting gigs that were pitched to me lately that I had to walk away from, because they wanted this constant interaction by zoom. There's one of them that actually wanted like all of these interactions that happened over zoom to be recorded and logged and I'm like "on no." You know, I got out of this company culture of surveillance that's so prevalent in staffing for a reason. The last thing I want to do is sit at home, like I'm at home, so I could be in my element. I often have hat hair when I'm around the farm and ranch here. The last thing I want to do is get dolled up to sit in my home office and do some kind have pre-recorded nonsense. It just it seems so irrelevant and so unnecessary to me. And I have to say, I think LinkedIn has turned into a giant pitch machine. You know, like on Facebook and Instagram, I get maybe two posts from people or organizations that I actually want to see. And then I get an ad of some kind. So it's about 33 to 35% of my feeds on all of these platforms are just nothing the ads, and then you go to LinkedIn, and it's all in your inbox. And a lot of them have an immediate ask for a zoom meeting, which is not going to freakin happen. If so, if you're listening to this, and you're a salesperson, and you're thinking about pitching me anything that involves hopping on a quick zoom call, please just don't it's a waste of your time. You can cross me off your prospecting list. And people going, Oh, I hope that this message finds you well. I hope that you and your family are safe amidst the current climes. It's like, really? First of all, I've gotten that message 58,000 times already, you don't know me, you're a random person that's asked to connect with me on LinkedIn and then hit me with an immediate sales pitch. I promise you, you don't care about how I and my family are doing and it's the current climes-- you don't know us-- just be real what what is it that you're selling? What product or service is it that you have, that you're wanting to get me interested in? I'll have a lot more respect for a direct approach of here by my stuff than I hope I hope that you and your family are doing well. Um, it's the current climbs insert, you know, crazy organ music here like okay, no, you don't just be straight up with me, please. So I have I have a tremendous amount of fatigue around anything involving unnecessary zoom meetings, unnecessary video conferencing, companies that want to continue this pan opticon culture of surveillance now by doing it with recorded everything With all these cheesy greasy sales pitches that I'm getting on LinkedIn, so it's thinking about all this and just kind of meditating on this topic of Alright, so how do we find happiness? If we're stuck in a situation that we really have no control over? If we feel like, you know, I don't know, maybe the bad guy is winning or you know how when the hell is COVID going to be over? When is all? Yeah, I don't want the new normal. I want to go back to being able to move about the earth freely. What do we do? How do we handle it? As I was contemplating that I thought about this passage from Joe Dispenza, his book Becoming Supernatural, because he issues almost like a warning in a way of whenever you start doing this work of really honing in on what it is that you want in life, and visualizing it and meditating on it and believing that it will show up for you. There's some stuff that might go to hell. He uses some examples of people who started doing that work and they lost their job, or their marriage broke up their girlfriend left them. Or their best friend of 15 years said, Yeah, I don't, I don't want to hang out with you anymore, lose my number. And they would sit and think, well, what is this, like I'm trying to manifest positive results. I'm trying to get the life that I really truly want. So why does it seem like everything's up in flames instead of being peaches and cream. And frankly, it's very tempting in that moment to say, Okay, wait a minute, I'm not going to get into deliberate creation. I'm not going to start visualizing all these positive things that I want to have happen. If it's just going to blow my life up. I don't want to go through some temporary discomfort. I don't want to go through any kind of loss or experience any kind of change. I just want everything to happen on my own terms and on my own timeline, and I don't want to experience any kind have mild discomfort or irritation along the way. Well, how realistic is that? It's not really the way of Mother Nature to allow us to experience change without any kind of personal or professional growth. There are times when good opportunities and new connections just fall into our lap. seemingly out of nowhere. Somebody just takes a shine to us and gives us a good break. An unexpected person connects with you and they just love you and it's wonderful, you know, and then other times, it doesn't go as smoothly and you may face some real irritations and hardships along the way. So what do you do? Do you just give up and say, okay, no, I'm gonna stay stuck in my comfort zone. I'm not gonna try to do anything new and innovative, just universe leave me the heck alone and let me sit here by myself. I wish that were realistic sometimes, but we really don't have that option either. You know, I once heard Joyce Meyer, say, you can either pick the pain of change, or you can pick the pain of trying to stay stuck forever. You get to pick what you want. But you're going to have to go through some growing pains either way. So it's like you might as well experience the pain of change because at least when you're doing that, you're growing, you're developing, you're innovating. You have some new skills that you can use, you have a thicker skin, a better set of armor, like you know, okay, if this kind of doo-doo poop situation happens to me again, I can handle it. I survived at once I can handle it again. But when we try to stay stuck, we're not growing. We're not innovating. We're not pushing that sense of self reliance, the ability to say okay, If If this poopy situation ever happens to me again, I know I can survive it, I did it before, I'll do it again. So one immediate tip that I have for cultivating happiness, even though it's going to sound quite counterintuitive. If you have to choose between the pain of trying to stay stagnant, or the pain of change, pick the pain of change those growing pains that you're going to experience as you're building a new relationship or building a company, building a new business, trying to finish school, whatever, it's so much better than the pain of just saying, you know what, I'll retreat. I'll hide in the shadows. I won't ever try anything new again in my life. I'm just going to stay small and hide away from the world. I again, I wish sometimes that it was even possible to live that way. But it's not I swear, it's like change has a way of finding us. There's a Yiddish proverb that says man plans and God laughs and it's really quite true. The second tip would be make sure that you carve out some quiet time every day. And I know that can be easier said than done, especially if you're trapped at home with a large family. And it seems like everybody is always needing something from you. Even if you have to go hide in the garage or the kitchen pantry for five minutes, find someplace that you can go and have solitude, even just for a few minutes, because getting away from that sense of pressure or bad news or bad reports, it will really give you the opportunity to just catch your breath. And so often when we're in that battle weary type of place, you know, we're just we're tired. That's all it is. And there's something so restorative about a good night's sleep or having some quiet time to yourself where you can just turn the pressure off. I heard TD Jakes read a message the other day about psi like, we all have a certain PSI, just like equipment does.There's times when you're not going to be able to take tremendous amounts of pressure forever and ever and ever, at some point, the valve has to be shut off. So you can just it doesn't make you a failure. And it doesn't make you weak. It just means Congratulations, you're human. The third thing I recommend is to have some type of morning ritual that puts you in the vortex. And it does not matter what that ritual is. It's highly specific to whatever puts you in your happy place and allows you to get out of the bed in a good mood and on the right foot. When we have one of those mornings, where it's like we get up out of bed, and we're grumpy and we're groggy, and we like immediately stub our toe on the bedframe and we're like palling around, find the light switch in the bathroom. It's like oh, It's amazing how the whole rest of the day has the tendency to be blah. It's like, Oh, I stubbed my toe getting out of bed. I didn't get enough sleep last night. So this day is already shot to hell. And when we feel that way, like, that's exactly how the day is going to be. It's much easier to start the day out in a good mood on a good frame of mind, and then keep that momentum rolling. So it could be that you spend your morning in prayer, it could be that you have a gratitude journal or a happiness journal. It could be that you read religious scriptures or you read inspiring stories, something like Chicken Soup for the Soul. Or you may want to look at pictures that you find uplifting or write out 10 or 12. positive affirmations express some kind of gratitude. That's one of the highest vibrations that we can put out into the world and believe me, I know It's hard sometimes, you know, if you're sitting there and you're like, well, I really don't know where my next check is coming from, or I just got laid off from my job. I'm thinking about shutting my company down. My spouse just left me or my kids are acting like devils in the house and I'm just ready for them to get gone to school. Like how you want me to get up in the morning and start expressing gratitude. I don't feel very grateful right now. I get it. I really do. Because I've had some mornings where I felt like I was, you know, having to like, thank you. Thank you, God, this, this is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. Thank Thank you. It reminds me of the time that I was at the DMV, and there was this guy who was just being super rude. I mean, nobody likes to go to the DMV anyway, and it seems like they always have the longest lines in human history, but this guy was just I mean, he's really being unnecessarily rude. To the clerk and snapping off and acting like a turd. And whenever their business was conducted he was still paying off and this woman I'll never forget it, she was like, okay, sir, thank you have a blessed day. Next. You can tell. Then when she said, you know, have a blessed day. Thank you Next what she really meant was eff off. Just get out of here, get lost, beat it. I'm giving you the polite brush off. We've all had those mornings, I think we're like, okay, okay, I'm glad I woke up today. We didn't necessarily mean it. But we were just like, you know, trying to get into that happy place. Even if it's a struggle for you, at first, do whatever it is that you can to feel a few moments or in the beginning, it may only be a few seconds, it may be that you can only have five seconds of a sustained like positive vibration, build on that. If you really set the intention of starting the day from a place of a positive mindset and some gratitude. Even if you wind up Having to slay some dragons that day, if you get some disappointing news or something happens and you're like, Oh man, this isn't what I want to deal with today, at least you have started the day out from a place of replenishment. And if you're not sleeping well at night, a dress that you know if you need to talk to your doctor, if you need to reevaluate how much caffeine that you're drinking through the day, whatever it is, that could be impeding you from getting a good night's sleep, get that addressed, because it's also very hard to stay in any kind of positive frame of mind, when you're really tired. It also makes you more irritable, and it makes you more likely to make poor nutritional choices. And that can over the course of the day spiral into a lot of things that cause us to not feel good. If you're relying on too much caffeine, too much sugar and processed foods just to get through the day. It often turns into this vicious cycle where then you're also not sleeping well at night, which causes you to turned to caffeine and sugar and processed food the next day and so on. care about yourself enough to talk to a medical professional about that situation, so that you can wake up refreshed, you got a good night's sleep, you can have some kind of gratitude or happiness or prayer ritual in the morning to get started on the right foot. Now, I can't promise that these results are gonna immediately turn you into Little Miss Sunshine or Pollyanna, but I do guarantee that it will be a good building block for you to get started. It's so much better to wake up in the morning expecting to have a good day and to say no matter what happens. I'm going to get back in the vortex anytime I feel myself getting out. The universe will give you more things to feel grateful about and it will give you more opportunities to get into that happy place may not happen overnight. But I promise you if you keep doing those rituals, they do work. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it if you haven't already, please Take a quick minute to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai