Week one – Stay in control

My Window of inspiration!

Happy New Year to all!

And as promised on my last blog in 2013, this year I will be sharing with you my observations and experiences on a weekly basis. This is my personal goal to push myself to do more writing and exercise my power of observation. And if you read my last blog (if you haven’t you can still do so, still there!) you will recall the analogy I made about staring out of the window. I shared the impact of turning what you see and observe into reality. The concept focused on a writer and how he or she is busy at work while staring out of the window, getting inspiration for their next piece. In other words, writing is the easy part, getting the idea is hard. And I challenged everyone to stair out of your own window, and use that moment to get your best ideas to put into action.

I talked about my window being my travel time, observing everything around me and that I would use it as the basis of my blog, what I saw or experienced. As it turns out, January will be a quite month for me with only a couple of trips planned and the rest of the time working from my office or being at home. But nevertheless, I did promise to write every week and that is what I am going to do, so here is week one, a blog about observations of the last few days of 2013 and the beginning of 2014.

I’ve entitled week one “stay in control” as the thing that hit me in the face this week was how much I need to be in control of my emotions and how important it is to manage situations you are faced with.

And the holiday season is a time when we need to be in control of our emotions and feelings. I am sure we all experience these past few days’ emotions and feelings as we met with many family and friends to celebrate the festivities of Christmas and New Year. Some of these were positive and some were negative, as we try to socialise with people we may only see occasionally and around this time of the year. I have been at home since my last trip in 2013 and it has been great to spend well-deserved time with my family. We have also seen and met friends over the holiday season, gone out a couple of times and hosted people around in our house, it is all part of this time of the year.

And it was during one of these events that I understood how important it is to stay in control. During social gatherings arguments always spark on subjects we all feel very passionate about. What happens when you discuss a subject you know about? Well, you believe you are the expert.  And often enough you may not be the expert and the other person may know more about it than you. At this point you should always back away and give the ground to the expert to finish off the conversation and move onto the next subject. However, we know this is not the case and fuelled with a bit of wine and too much emotion we not only know we are the experts but we are also the person who had experienced on this particular situation, so we don’t let go.

Sadly, I fell a victim of this situation during one of this social gathering and at one point I slammed my feast onto the table to make my point and that got everyone’s attention bring that awkward silence and moment where you wish you had not done that.

Later that evening, my wife reminded me of the moment and that it was pretty embarrassing.  I have to admit she is right. So as a person who does not believe in hindsight or having regrets about my actions, I wanted to use the power of observation and I played a memory video in my head of that moment to see myself completely and utterly not in control! Lesson learned, and now I am aware I must stay in control!

Apart from helping me to change my own behaviour, this was my “staring out of the window” moment, my chance to observe human behaviour to inspire me to write. So I’ve taken what happened that day and I am putting it into good use.

First of all, it was the inspiration I needed to write my first blog! My objective is to stay on track of my commitment to write and I just needed that moment to “stair out of the window” to bring my first week’s observations to life, and I do hope that by the end of the blog some of you will identify with this situation and beginning to think about staying in control.

I am also now more aware of what I did and I won’t let situations get hold of my emotions and feelings towards someone or something. Shortly after this incident I got an e-mail, which I read, I pressed the reply button straight away and I began to type furiously my answer. I got about half way when I stopped and remember to be in control. I closed it and moved away from it. This is an important part of my everyday life as I deal with thousands of people both during travel and at work that can easily get me wind up and I might end up banging my feast again. So no more feast banging for me, I will now smile and think, “I am in control”

I also think that self-control is probably a good topic to start my year. It is a much bigger subject that would take more than a blog to explore, so we can come back to this topic throughout the next 51 weeks to remind ourselves of the power that exists from being in control.

For now, and I did promise to keep it short, as we beginning our new year of observation, I encourage you to reflect on what experiences you had this holiday season with people who may have rubbed you the wrong way, either at a dinner party, at the supermarket, when you were trying to board a train or just simply someone closed to you trying to get you to see something their way, did you stay in control or did you end up banging that feast to make your point?