Nobody Controls Your Mood But You
And most people don't know it
Think about yesterday.
The cashier who was rude for no reason. The driver who cut you up on the roundabout. The kids being difficult at bedtime. The colleague who sent that email in that tone. The weather. The news. The Wi-Fi going down at the exact moment you needed it.
Now think about how much of your day those things consumed. The replaying. The frustration. The low-level irritation that followed you from one situation into the next.
If you let external circumstances dictate your mood, you will never run out of material.
The kids aren’t being naughty. They’re being kids. The cashier might be having the worst day of their life. The driver didn’t even see you. None of it was personal. But you took it personally, absorbed it, and carried it into everything that followed.
Stop making other people’s bad days your problem.
I used to drink my way through it
I run a high pressure recruitment business. My entire operation relies on other people doing what they said they would. Candidates committing. Clients following through. Placements holding.
People are unpredictable. Things unravel. This is the baseline condition of the work, not the exception.
Years ago, my default response to that kind of stress was alcohol. A grown man, running a business, reaching for a drink because a candidate didn’t show up. The problem sat exactly where I’d left it afterwards. The candidate still hadn’t shown, the client was still waiting, just with a worse version of me available to deal with it.
I’ve been sober for over four years. Sobriety removes the exit door. You feel what you feel, and then you figure out what to do with it. No shortcut. Just the situation and a decision about how to handle it.
That’s what forced me to actually build something useful.
The pause between event and response
My mood used to track whatever was happening around me. Good news, good mood. Bad news, bad mood. Stressful afternoon, drink. It sounds ridiculous now. It was ridiculous then.
The problems didn’t get smaller as the business grew. They multiplied. What shifted was the space between what happens and how I respond.
Before, there was no space. Event, reaction, consequence. No pause. A reflex wearing the mask of a personality.
Building that pause takes deliberate effort. It doesn’t arrive on its own.
Here’s what to do before the noise arrives
Daily stretching. Daily breathwork. Quiet time in the morning before the noise arrives. I used to treat these as rewards for a good week. The first things to drop when things got busy.
They’re the last things that should drop. What these practices actually do is activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your brain responsible for calm, clear thinking. Most people spend their days locked in low-level fight or flight without realising it. Cortisol elevated, threat response dialled up, reacting to emails and traffic and rude cashiers as if they’re actual dangers. The body can’t tell the difference between a near-miss on the motorway and a difficult client. It just fires.
Stretching, breathwork, and intentional quiet time train the nervous system down from that state. The pause between event and response gets wider. A difficult email at 9am stops bleeding into the afternoon. The rude cashier stops taking up mental real estate it has no business occupying.
Three major business problems landed last weekend. The habits held. So did I.
Zoom out. See the facts. Action what needs actioning.
When something goes wrong, this is the process.
Zoom out. Strip the emotion away and look at what actually happened. The facts, not the meaning attached to them.
See the facts plainly. A candidate didn’t show. A client is unhappy. A placement fell through. These are events that require solutions. Nothing more than that.
Action what needs actioning. Make the call. Send the message. Have the conversation. Fix what can be fixed, move past what can’t.
Most things that hijack a day require no action at all. The stranger on the motorway. The cashier. The weather. They just require you to let them pass.
Something happened. What are the facts? What, if anything, needs doing?
Most of the time: nothing. Move on.
You get to choose who drives.
- Chris
P.S. I’ve had the downtime. The race. The recovery. Now I’m moving into 6 to 8 weeks of deep, focused work. There are things in the pipeline I haven’t spoken about publicly yet. A live workshop in the next few weeks. The 10-Hour CEO Mastermind Version 2 launching in May. And something I’ve kept completely under wraps that goes live this summer. You’ll hear about all of it here first.
P.P.S. Your emotional state is the one thing nobody can take from you. Most people give it away before breakfast. Don’t be most people.
P.P.S. What’s been controlling your mood lately that you could just let go of? Reply and tell me.
Spot on Chris. And when we are in that instant response situation we are not fun to be around. Our family never get to have the best version of us with them. We need to have that separation and space between all the stuff going wrong and the control it has on us.