When I’m working on professional projects, I love to have classical music playing in the background. It allows me to relax and stay really tuned into my work. But personally, when I’m doing things such as washing dishes or things around the house, I prefer to have old school television shows on, things that I grew up with in my maybe 20’s and 30’s.
Think Seinfeld, Friends, The Office. I love to have those going in the background because it brings me joy and I don’t have to really pay attention to it. I pretty much know every line from every episode of those shows by heart, but every once in a while I’ll hear something and I’ll think, “Oh, wait, I haven’t heard this line in a long time, I want to hear what they said.” Or maybe I want to pick up a specific way that they said it, that might even be for a professional communication.
So I love it because streaming devices, we have that quick just click of a button and we just pop back 10 seconds at a time, a frame at a time. It’s so simple and so easy. And this is where I feel we need to remind ourselves that we are just like these streaming devices; we have that rewind button. We may start off, whether it’s a new year or the middle of the year, we may be starting a new role, maybe starting a new project – something new, and for whatever reason, partway into it you’re thinking, this isn’t going how I intended it to go.
Maybe even in a communication, a conversation with someone, it starts and you think, wait a minute, this isn’t where I wanted it to go. Well, you are just like a streaming device. You have an opportunity to go back and rewind. Is it going to erase the thing that just happened? No, but you have an opportunity to restart.
There is very little that you do in the world that can’t be restarted and reassessed.
I encourage you that as you’re moving forward, whether this is weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever it looks like for you, that when you get a sense of yourself of like, gosh, that didn’t go how I wanted it to, or you start to feel like, I am going to give up, this isn’t working. Take that moment, just hit a little bit of a rewind and think, how could I start over?
Maybe not starting everything over, but how could I start a piece of this over? What could I do to just simply rewind and reset, to get it back on track? Whether that’s you, the conversation, the intention, just to get it back on track. So don’t forget, you always, always have an opportunity to rewind and redo it over again, and we are really looking to unlock that X factor, so you become that elite communicator. This is just simply one of the ways!