I was excited for March.

I had planned some great product improvements to work on for RightMessage.

And then… “chores” got in the way.

By “chores” I mean the kind of work that doesn’t have any obvious / sexy outward-facing benefits.

Upgrading product language versions…

Preventing scaling issues…

One-off administrative work that can’t easily be outsourced…

The kind of work where if it’s done right the end result looks exactly the same as before you started.

I feel like I’m putting effort in, but I’m not getting anywhere. It’s treading water.

Now, I know that none of this is the end of the world. The product works fine. The business is doing well. I can easily work on the updates in April instead.

So… why did it make me feel shitty?

Because it results in some of my core emotional needs not being met.

We all have emotional needs, and we all have various ways we can fulfil those. For me, I love creating things. And showing them to people. I find it incredibly rewarding and motivating to create something new, and to hear from people that it’s made a real difference to them.

Those are the sort of things that make me love my work.

And so when those are taken away, even for a short time, it’s easy to feel unfulfilled.

It’s hard to realise that this is what’s happening, too. I got to a point of feeling like things were ‘a bit flat’; that I wasn’t in the best mood; that I wasn’t ‘feeling myself’; but it took some reflection to understand that this was why.

Getting back to a healthy place is a two-step process:

1. Totally accept that this is the way things are right now

My intentions for March were one thing… and reality looked different.

And it’s important to realise that that’s OK.

No good comes from beating myself up that I couldn’t get those intended things done.

This is my philosophy of ‘never picking a fight with reality’—you won’t win!

That doesn’t mean things have to stay that way—I can work to change things moving forward—but first accepting that the past and present are the way they are is critical.

2. Fulfil those emotional needs elsewhere

My emotional subsystems have no idea whether I’m getting fulfilment from one business vs another business vs a leisure activity. As long as the core needs are getting fulfilled somewhere and somehow.

So, if it’s my need to be creative that isn’t being fulfilled, all I need to do is make sure to fulfil that need by upping my creative endeavours somewhere else. Maybe I build something new on the computer. Or play more piano in the evening.

If I have a need to feel ‘productive’, i.e. that I’ve produced more things, I can write more (like this).

If I need to feel like I’ve accomplished or achieved something, I can learn a new skill. For me this month that’s been swimming (including how to tread water, ironically 😀).

And so on. The formula is always the same:

What’s the core underlying emotional need that needs fulfilling, and what is another thing I can use to fulfil that same need?

How are you feeling at the moment? If you’re low, what emotional needs aren’t being met (for many people there’ll be a lot, thanks to lockdowns around the world): is there anything else you can sub in to fulfil some of those same needs differently in the meantime?