How to Stop a Bad Day From Turning Into a Bad Life

How to Stop a Bad Day From Turning Into a Bad Life

Last week I wrote about our dishwasher breaking. I have an update. It's still broken, and the man fixing it lives here now.

He's been in our kitchen for three days. Three days, for a dishwasher. I looked it up. I asked ChatGPT. If anybody had told me on day one that this was a three-day repair, I'd have driven to the store, bought a new dishwasher, and been home before lunch. Which, by the way, we couldn't get to, because he was standing in front of it.

It was supposed to be a quick fix. A three-hour tour, if you're old enough to remember how that went for Gilligan.

Jana and I work from home. I'd like to lean on the word "work" there, because somewhere around day two the repair guy started treating our house like an office he'd joined. He took calls at the counter. Long ones. I fully expected him to start answering mine. I was trying to work out whether we owed him a salary and a parking spot. And the whole time, the dishwasher beeped. All day. The kind of beep that was designed so you can't ignore it, which I assume was invented by someone who never had to listen to it.

Put a class on top of that, one Jana and I are taking together that she was convinced was a waste of her time, and by the end of the week two movies were playing in my head on a loop. Poltergeist and The Money Pit.

If you haven't seen The Money Pit, Tom Hanks buys a house and it falls apart around him one piece at a time. If you haven't seen Poltergeist, maybe skip it this week. You've been through enough.

I'm the positive one. Ask anybody.

Something you should know about our marriage. I'm the most positive person in it. I'm the dreamer who won't stop, no matter how many Goliaths line up in the road. I will find the silver lining in a parking ticket. Jana isn't far behind me, but she puts some boundaries on her realism, and I mostly don't. That's a big part of why we work.

So it was a little humbling, sitting down to record this episode, to notice the dreamer had spent three days in a funky mood.

And it piled up the way laundry piles up. A little at a time. A beep, a guy in the kitchen, an interruption, a class you didn't want to be in, another beep. None of it was a tragedy. Stack enough of it and you start reading the whole day through it.

Jana caught it in herself first. At one point the repair guy walked up and interrupted her in the middle of her work, and she snapped at him. Later she went back and reread a couple of text messages she'd taken as rude, and found two perfectly ordinary texts. She'd read them through three days of beeping.

I was running my own version. At the end of each day my first thought was that the day was wasted. I'd go straight to the to-do list and count what didn't get done. Then I'd replay my conversations and pick out the one sour note in each, like I was panning for it.

That's the part that gets you. When your mood is off, your brain goes looking for proof that the mood is right. And it finds it, every time, because there's always a beep somewhere.

Where a bad week turns into a bad year

On the episode I said something I'd like to stay with for a minute.

Live in that state long enough and the cost gets a lot bigger than one ruined afternoon. You start expecting the worst. And when you expect the worst, you stop wanting to walk out the door into it. Why would you? If the world is going to be one more crummy interruption, staying in feels smart.

So you skip the call. You don't pitch the thing. You show up to the class with your arms crossed. Little retreats, and every one of them sounds reasonable at the time.

If you stop showing up for life, life stops showing up for you.

Jana told our listeners to rewind that part and play it a few more times. I'm biased, but she's right.

Nobody decides to stop showing up. It goes a few inches at a time, and every inch comes with a good excuse. That's what makes it hard to catch. You never get a day you can point to.

Changing the question without pretending

Jana said something in the middle of all this that I'd like you to hear the right way. What we were doing was not toxic positivity. We weren't going to pretend the week was great. The week was loud and irritating, and the dishwasher still didn't work.

What we did was change the question.

At the end of a day, we run four questions. We call it the 4-Minute Reflection Formula. The first question is the one that did the heavy lifting this week:

What did I do well?

The first time you ask that on a bad day, the answer is usually "nothing." So ask it again, slower.

We showed up to the class. Jana made an angry face through the entire thing, and she'll tell you that herself, but she was in the room. We got out of bed. We got dressed. We held our tongues more times than we didn't. We put up with a stranger in our kitchen for three days and everybody survived. We got the work done that we sat down to do, around the beeping.

None of that goes on a to-do list, which is the whole problem. Jana and I are workhorses. We're built to get through it. We're not great at noticing that getting through it was the accomplishment.

Better questions get you a better life. "Why does everything in this house break?" sends your brain hunting for more broken things. "What did I do well?" sends it hunting for something else. Same brain. Same day. It finds what you ask it to find.

Then the other three questions do their part. What MIGHT I have done differently? (Probably not snapped at the repair guy. Probably asked how long the repair would take before he started.) How will I be more effective tomorrow? And the last one, which shows up in the morning practice too: How lucky am I?

You don't have to run all four for it to count. On a rough day, the first one alone will move you. You can run it after a single phone call. There's no wrong way to do it.

Resetting the next segment

The evening questions clean up a day once it's over. They don't do much for you at two in the afternoon, when you've just been interrupted for the fourth time and you can feel the rest of the day starting to tip.

For that, Jana and I use the morning questions, just smaller. We run them on a segment instead of a whole day. What do I want to experience? How do I want to grow? How do I want to contribute? How lucky am I? In this moment is implied. We don't say it out loud.

Something is always going to throw a wrench in. A repair guy, a hard conversation, a text you read wrong. When it happens, you don't have to write off the rest of the day. Pause. Take a breath. Then ask the four questions about the next segment. The last one went sideways. This one hasn't started yet.

That's how we got through fourteen months of going from last place to World Champion in adaptive water skiing. There were bumps and bruises and challenges and plenty of disagreements, and any one of them could have taken the whole day down with it. Mostly they didn't, because we kept resetting the next segment instead of grading the last one.

How big a segment is depends on how you live. It might be a meeting, a phone call, the drive home, the hour before the kids get up. My top clients slice it whatever way fits their rhythm. There's no wrong size.

Hey, Nancy

Jana has a name for her inner critic. It's Nancy.

Her point on the episode was that you have to celebrate the small wins, the really small ones, and make a bigger deal out of them than feels reasonable. Nancy is loud. Nancy has never once had trouble making a big deal out of something. If your inner cheerleader is going to compete, it has to be at least as loud as Nancy.

I'll add what I've seen from the dreamer's side. Once you start counting the small wins, you start spotting bigger ones. You show up a little differently the next day. And life, which doesn't care who the positive one is, starts showing up a little differently too.

That's the only reason I'm the positive one, by the way. It isn't temperament. It's reps. Noticing this stuff is our job, so we ask these questions more than most people do, the same way a carpenter picks up a level more than you do. We have coaches and a mastermind whose whole purpose is to push us past where we'd stop on our own. And I still spent three days in the funk. I just noticed it a little sooner.

Living Lucky® Practice

The Micro-Win Sweep

For the end of a rough day. Bring the day exactly as it was. You'll leave with proof you handled more of it than it felt like.

01  What's still bugging you about today?

One or two lines. Name it so it stops running in the background.

02  What did I do well?

Three things. At least one has to be something that would never make a to-do list: getting up, holding your tongue, staying in the room.

On the to-do list

Never on any list

03  What did I read through my mood?

A text, a comment, a look. Write what you heard, then what was actually said.

04  What MIGHT I have done differently?

One thing. Keep it kind. This is a note to yourself, not a verdict.

05  How will I be more effective tomorrow?

Small enough that you'll actually do it before lunch.

06  How lucky am I?

Look back at question 02 before you answer this one.

Print this worksheet Nothing you type here is saved or sent anywhere.

05  How will I be more effective tomorrow?

Small enough that you'll actually do it before lunch.

06  How lucky am I?

Look back at question 02 before you answer this one.

Print this worksheet Nothing you type here is saved or sent anywhere.