I’m working on trying to change my mindset. A mental hack perhaps. I am trying to put certain aspects of my life into mental buckets. When there is time to devote to that “bucket,” I’ll take the cover off and devote whatever cognitive capacity I have at that moment to that bucket. Perhaps this is called mindfulness, or living in the moment? I have yet to really look into the proper labels. In a way, it’s related to not taking your work home with you.

What I have found is that I have a tendency towards workaholism in the sense that I cannot disengage from work-related problems, likely due to some underlying issues like anxiety or perfectionism. I tend towards rumination – I dwell too much on problems, primarily in our business.

I think the underlying anxiety I feel is related to age and the question that Sheryl once asked, “If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?” A question I don’t have an answer to. There is also a tinge of anger towards the source of many of our problems, something I will write about later.

I recently shared with Camren one of the methods I was taught many years ago, related to musical performance. Often, problems creep into your playing as a musician, or perhaps there is a particular music passage that you always play poorly. Sometimes it’s stage fright. These issues become even more acute the more you focus on them, and it can get to the point that you can hardly function at all.

I was taught early to be a systems thinker. What are you doing holistically? What process to being better are you taking? Almost universally, when I focused on the process, the problems went away.

That’s the approach I am going to try to take again. The first step is to stop this incessant focus on the problem and just try to be good (which is good enough) at what I want to do.