Sunday, October 18, 2009

An EXCELent endorsement

One of the best aspects of Dr. Low’s system is when you can head off a full-blown panic, a real whopper of a tantrum, and/or a category 5 hurricane of symptoms just by using his method’s simple, commonsense tools. I had one of these mega-endorsements the other night.

I had a big work project ahead of me: Color coding more than 800 lines of an Excel spreadsheet, line by line. After leaving the office and having a quick dinner, I spent 2-1/2 hours on this project, finishing up around 10 pm. After feeling quite happy about getting this task off my plate, I decided to reopen the file to double check something—and to my dismay all of the color coding was gone. I quickly realized that the file format I had saved the file in did not support text formatting (such as colors).

I could feel anxious and angry symptoms start to brew, but I instantly spotted that this was a distressing but not dangerous situation. I made my mental health a business and refused to participate in working up this triviality. I recognized that mistakes are average and lowered my standards for myself. With this self-confidence, I fell asleep quickly and repeated the work in the morning, using the correct file format this time.

Before Recovery I would have called someone at the late hour to complain. That would not have been group minded and would have worked me up more. I would have accused myself instead of excused myself and made a mountain out of a molehill. But instead I used Dr. Low’s tools to make my mental health my top priority. For this I gave myself a hearty endorsement!

I endorsed for writing this post.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi, Doug, love the humor and EXCELlent example of using old-fashioned RI tools to deal with frustrations, including our modern technology-related ones. I totally empathize--just wrote you a well-thought out BRILLIANT (;) ) comment that got lost when I tried to publish it. Not the first time and definitely not the last time! Keep endorsing and keep that inner smile.

Kaci said...

Sounds like things are moving in a positive direction for you! I've found it helpful to read your blog!

Blogger with Ocd said...

Good for you! Even a non-anxious person would be frustrated at what happened.

www.itsmewithocd.blogspot.com

Doug said...

Thank you, everyone, for your comments. ENDORSE for taking the time to write them! :)