Calm is the answer to busy.
Busy doesn’t mean productive – it often spells bouts of increased anxiety topped off by a feeling that important things are still not getting done and another round of anxiety follows.
Calm is a word we don’t hear much these days.
Calm is also a key component to dealing with stress.
Nick Foles, the unlikely Super Bowl MVP last year for the Philadelphia Eagles tries to act as a calming force instilling confidence and security in his players.
Creating an atmosphere where admitting mistakes comes easy.
Doing the right thing is the ultimate decider of how to use valuable time.
To gain the quality of being calm, practice on others by showing them how you can calm down a situation and help instill confidence in them.
It’s true multitasking will make you feel busy and focusing too much on digital devices will make you feel overwhelmed and under pressure. But simply cutting these things out will not work.
Develop calm in others and you will develop calm in yourself.
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Hi Jerry,
Perfection is such a great topic!
I admit that I aim for perfection, taught to me, in part, by my folks, and later in the Air Force, and during my TV and radio career. (You and I have chatted before.)
In 1967, I was a kid just out of high school in suburban Boston and helped put together a small radio station in our town. Yup, the FCC found out about the operation, showed up in person, and as the two-man crew left, they whispered: “We get a lot of these stations, but yours is the most professionally-run that we’ve ever seen!” WOW!
The local papers did a couple of stories about two brothers and a friend running this station out of our friend’s home. It caught the eye of a local resident who, it turns out, was the film director at Ch. 7 in Boston. He asked if I’d like a summer job in his film department? And, my friend with the keen electronic background, ended up in Master Control.
(Later, he moved to Dallas to open his own audio company, went on the road with folks like Cat Stevens and Willie Nelson, today operates his own station QX-FM.com and recently opened a communications and broadcast museum, profiled on this Texas program: http://thetexasbucketlist.com/2016/04/the-texas-bucket-list-texas-museum-of-broadcasting-and-communications.)
I’m getting ahead of myself. :)
One day at work, as I was splicing commercials together, my boss, the film director, asked me about a problem that impacted commercials on the air. Turns out that during my inspection and cleaning of the commercial film reel being readied for broadcast, I had failed to remove a three-inch piece of masking tape used as a reminder that a missing commercial needed to be inserted at this point on the reel. The head of engineering came down and was none too happy with me as the film reel gummed up the projector, and I couldn’t blame anybody, but myself. It was a very strong lesson learned.
Time marched on and I continued working Ch.7 as a writer, producer, and assignment editor and spent 13 years during the infancy of rock and the later switch to talk, much of the time as a news anchor, at WRKO. And, as you know, Jerry, perfection was an absolute key to success
Attention to detail (is that different from perfection?) is so paramount in all walks of life, even at home with the family. But, my wife believes that I’m a bit too gung-ho while she’s the complete opposite.
For example, she’ll constantly forget to turn off, say, a closet light, leaving the switch-flipping to me. So, as you can see, the issue of perfection can be a source of irritation. But, in my experience of 40 years in broadcasting, perfection leads all of us down the golden path.
My apologies for being so long-winded!
Ron