Slumps and Self-Reflection

When an athlete is in a slump, it’s obvious. If you watch all the games, you can tell when they are off. If you don’t watch games, you can look at the numbers on the internet and you can see the numbers over a certain period of time aren’t what they regularly do. A slump isn’t one game, to me for an athlete it needs to last at least three games. But what about non-athletes? If I have a bad week, is that a slump?  If I was an NFL player and I considered three games a slump, that’s almost eighteen percent of the season. That means that in my job, if I had four weeks off every year, that would leave me forty-eight weeks. So, what is eighteen percent of forty-eight? If my math is correct, it’s a little over eight and a half weeks. So, a slump would be two and a half months? Here is what is crazy about that number, that just covers a certain part of the year. That doesn’t include bad days!

         That leads me to why I am writing today, I think I am in a slump. I don’t have any game films to watch or any numbers to look up on the internet, but the feeling I have is that I am in a slump. The frustrating part is that I can’t tell how long I have been in a slump. So, is it almost over, or am I looking at the rest of the year being rough? I don’t like it when people justify something by saying that they have a feeling.  Whenever I hear that I think that someone made a bad decision or didn’t do well, and they don’t want to discuss it. So instead of talking about why things didn’t go as planned, they just say it’s a feeling. That gets people out of doing any self-reflection. So, I guess that means that it’s time for some self-reflection. What am I seeing that is leading me to believe that I am in a slump? First, things that used to be easy, seem to be more difficult. Not the task itself, but I’m just distracted easier, so it’s taking longer to do. Second, I’m not getting the outcome I used to. I have a few things on my to do list that I felt were strengths, so the outcome always seemed to be a hundred percent. I had things in place so that if I missed something, it would be caught. Over the last few months, I’ve missed a few things and I’m not the one that caught it. At first you say that no one is perfect, but when it happens again, you really start to notice that you feel off. I also have been thinking that my people skills are off. I used to have the right balance of knowing how much time to spend with everyone. Currently it feels like my balance is off and so some people are feeling ignored. That leads to people being unhappy. Right now, I have some people in my life who are unhappy, and I feel like I play at least a small percentage of that. I’m not sure if I am distracted right now or that I have lost my direction. I’m not even sure if there is a big enough difference between those two things to spend time on trying to figure out which one it is. Sometimes when you are in a slump, you need to get back to the basics. If we stick with the football references, we need to focus on blocking and tackling. Other times you must walk away to clear your head. I feel like I need to figure out which one I need to do before I can move forward. Over the weekend I feel like I have done a good job of walking away, so in this situation, I think I need to go back and look at the basics. Part of going back to the basics for me is to make sure that I know my destination. If I know my destination, I know what direction I should be headed in.

         What are the basics that I need to go back to? For me, I must have a to do list.  When I have a to do list, that list not only has tasks that need to be completed, but names of people I need to focus on and times that I will be working on these things. I’m also a numbers guy, so I need to take a hard look at some numbers and see what I think needs to be done. When I look at numbers, I also see conversations that need to happen. Some conversations are good, some not so much. Either way, conversations are time spent with people. Hopefully, I have a good week and next week’s article will be about being back on track.