One of my incredible mentors raised an interesting question in a teleclass this week: Do you attract drama in your life or business?
Your first impulse might be to deny it. But what is drama really?
The dictionary definition of “drama” is a state, situation, or series of events involving interesting or intense conflict of forces, or excessively emotional performances or reactions.
Well, I don’t know about you, but if that is how drama is defined, I certainly can’t say that I haven’t experienced my fair share of it.
And if you are launching or running your own business, it is likely you have too.
What does drama do to us? Well, drama creates stress. And unless you have been living under a rock for the past few years, chances are that you have heard about what stress can do to your body. A quick refresher:
“The body doesn’t distinguish between physical and psychological threats. When you’re stressed over a busy schedule, an argument with a friend, a traffic jam, or a mountain of bills, your body reacts just as strongly as if you were facing a life-or-death situation. If you have a lot of responsibilities and worries, your emergency stress response may be “on” most of the time. The more your body’s stress system is activated, the easier it is to trip and the harder it is to shut off.
Long-term exposure to stress can lead to serious health problems. Chronic stress disrupts nearly every system in your body. It can raise blood pressure, suppress the immune system, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, contribute to infertility, and speed up the aging process. Long-term stress can even rewire the brain, leaving you more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.”
Yuck, right? I know that none of us want to face these physical and emotional risks.
So, how do we prevent ourselves from becoming another stress-related statistic? The answer lies in the simple question: Do you create drama, attract it, seek it out…Are you a drama junkie?
This takes some real soul-searching to get to the answer.
The first place to look is your past to see if there are patterns that you can see in your life – patterns in your relationships, your work experiences, your family, your money situation, etc…. Most of us continue in the same kind of cycles in life until we become aware of those cycles and make a firm decision to change their experiences and the results of those experiences.
Remember that famous quote by Albert Einstein about cycles? He said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
I am here to say that drama is just about the most destructive cycle you can get caught in as a business owner. Besides the awful physical and emotional havoc it can wreck on you, it can also undo all of your hard work, make forward progress difficult if not impossible, and can even ruin valued relationships.
Any way you look at it, drama can hurt you, your business and your Dramacool bottom line.
So, where is YOUR drama?
In your environment? Is your office a mess? Do you have clutter in your workspace? Are you months behind on your filing?
In your wallet? Are you up to date on your bookkeeping? Do you have a box, file or pile of receipts building up that you keep forgetting to do something with? Do you have unpaid bills or an unbalanced bank account?
In your relationships? Do you have someone in your life who sucks up all of your energy? Someone who discourages you or actively criticizes you? Do you have a relationship that is riddled with arguments, resentment or weighty expectations?
Can you see where I am going with this? I think if we are all honest with each other, we all have some area or areas where there is drama. In fact, many of us have likely learned to live with it day-in and day-out, the weight of it pushing down on us. We have learned to tune out the warning bells, the adrenaline rush, the frustration and to just live with the drama like it is an inevitable part of our lives.