Do you ever feel that your days are too short, that they´re not enough to be able to do everything you want (or need) to do?
That was totally me a few years ago when I bumped into a TV programme from RTÉ, the Irish national television, which was called precisely this: “Not enough hours”.
Recuerdo que en aquella época yo estaba bastante agobiada en general, de hecho el subtítulo de mi blog de entonces (la anterior encarnación de BinaryWords), era «en lucha contra el caos». Porque así era como me sentía: había mucho caos en mi vida, y yo tenía que luchar contra él, y todo se me hacía cuesta arriba… Básicamente lo que estaba pasando era que tenía un trabajo a jornada completa, una niña pequeñita más otra en camino, y unas expectativas de mí misma que no era capaz de cumplir.
So that TV programme was to me just what the doctor ordered, for multiple reasons. First, I felt better when I saw that what was happening to me was also happening to many others, in different ways. Second, I learned several things that I found both interesting and useful; I´m sharing two of them down below.
La tercera es que así fue como conocí a Owen Fitzpatrick, el psicólogo y experto en gestión del tiempo que presentaba el programa. En cada episodio acompañaba a una persona distinta, para ayudarla en su problema concreto. Me encantaba su forma de explicar los conceptos de gestión del tiempo, y cómo los aplicaba para conseguir una solución que de verdad funcionara para cada participante… Luego, charlando con un compañero de trabajo (¡gracias Tim!), me enteré de que Owen era experto en muchas otras áreas también, y así fue como acabé haciendo mi primer curso de PNL, en Dublín, allá por 2013, con Owen Fitzpatrick y Brian Colbert 🙂
These are the two learnings I took away from the programme, as I remember it:
- How perfectionism causes us more harm than good, and the “perfect” phrase to not let ourselves get blocked or stressed by it when tackling something:
It doesn´t need to be done perfectly, it only needs to be done.
(Owen Fitzpatrick, and many others using similar words)
Interestingly, even today, when I realize I´m stuck trying to perform a task to the level of perfection, what I hear in my head is Owen´s voice saying this phrase, and that helps a lot (it also confirms that one of my main representational systems is the auditory one, which is something I learned in his NLP course).
- How the concept of time is something abstract, represented internally in different ways by different people. For example, when imagining a timeline, some people visualize it from left to right, placing the past on one side and the future on the other side, while others represent it perpendicularly, placing the past behind them and the future in front of them. Depending on your particular internal way to represent time, you may find it more difficult to get organized with a traditional format calendar, and if so, there may be other strategies that suit you better to get things done.
What do you think about these two ideas? What would help you to make the most of your time?