What would you do if you have a plumbing business and it comes to light –for example industry colleagues or team members find out – that there are many issues with the plumbing in your own home?

What would you do if you called yourself The Vitality Expert and felt pretty ordinary?

In what has been referred to as “the irony of expertise” Oscar Trimboli said “Marketing leaders spend all day thinking deeply about developing campaigns to help position client and corporate brands. They are incredibly passionate and purposeful about the impact of positioning and branding because it’s their profession. Ironically these marketing leaders spend no time thinking about the positioning of their own individual professional brand.”

The other day

I’ll claim being The Vitality Expert and share a little of my day in the hope that it may give some practical ideas and therefore be useful for others in my world.

Just the other day, at 7am in summer, it was dark enough that I had lights on with doors and windows closed as there was a storm and the rain was blowing inside.

Ordinarily not such a big deal perhaps but this comes after nearly a week of weather-related incidents that have dominated my personal world and that of many people I love; persistent heavy rain and a flooding disaster over a large area of south east Queensland and northern New South Wales that has even been on the news in Europe.

Yes, sadly, there is war going on.

Yes, sadly, we are still going through that worldwide event that I deliberately won’t name.

I was safe and knew for sure that so so many others were having a worse day than me yet I still knew my vitality was challenged.

In case it’s useful I thought I’d share what I did to get to the point where I could even write this.

PEPPing myself up

I have my own word for vitality which is PEPP®.

PEPP® means living business and life through a lens of Purpose – Energy – Pleasure – Profit. That’s my recipe for changing anything.

With that in mind, what I did was:

  • Light some candles. Usually they are a “later in the day/evening” thing for me and I can’t remember ever lighting them at breakfast time before. Apart from looking pretty candles literally change the Energy of the room.
  • Rang a family member and then a close friend to check in on them as I knew they were dramatically influenced by the flooding rains over the weekend.

Once working with clients I start talking about an extra “P” in PEPP® and that is People. We need to look after ourselves first and foremost and then we can derive vicarious Pleasure and lift our Energy by helping others.

Checking in on others is also a very important part of looking after our own mental health and the mental health of others in our world.

  • Avoided social media to not get caught up in everyone else’s stories. Even though I was interested in updates from people who have devastating situations I needed to conserve and keep “energy in” for me.
  • Gratitude that another friend rang to check on me. They say what goes around comes around and I say vitality travels. I was sure happy to chat to a friend for nearly an hour even though it was a work day.
  • Spending a few minutes on the 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that has been spread across the dining room table since I was unwell with “that virus” a few weeks ago.

I thought that was a story for another day but perhaps it’s time to share that publicly too as there may be others in my community who feel like they are experiencing layer upon layer of adversity, after a couple of years of (perhaps) struggle. And I deliberately say “perhaps” because not everyone has felt the global negativity of recent times.

So when sick I did a few different activities to surrender to the surreal-ness of what was happening to me. Puzzles was one. I don’t think I’ve done a “grown up” puzzle in 40 years. A 500 piece one was completed in 24 hours but I recovered before finishing the 1,000 piece one and it’s been a source of novel amusement lately… a few minutes randomly as a pattern interrupt.

And that was enough

After doing those few things it occurred to me that I would write them down just on the off-chance that someone else could benefit.

I gave myself permission to be human. I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy but I had moved a few notches up the emotional scale to become more functional.

And then I remembered that famous Persian proverb “And this too shall pass”.

And then I remembered that sometimes not everything is as it seems. You may not be able to visibly see what’s going on.

I have written many times about the silent pain of living with mental illness. That’s one part of it. The other is, just because there is a physical disaster happening on your doorstep, some people may seem like they could be able to offer assistance but not be in a position to for a huge variety of other reasons that you are unaware of.

What else could I have tried?

These few ideas are just what came to my mind yesterday. Others I might have tried are going for a walk, playing some music, having another shower, journaling, meditating. Choose what appeals to you…

The Irony of Expertise

Now back to the irony of expertise. In “Psychology Today” Ashley N D Meyer Ph D said

“At the end of the day, before you abandon the opinions or choices of experts, however, know that along with these adverse effects of expertise, there are still important advantages of being an expert, like being able to make decisions more quickly and being able to parse apart relevant from irrelevant information when making decisions- important advantages that might matter more in the long run than the effects of the biases.”

So, just because I know and preach about vitality it doesn’t mean that I don’t need a PEPP® up myself from time to time!

What I hope it does mean though is that I can move through the slump quicker, mostly.

It also means that I can share my experiences by opening up and helping others.

Going forward

So that was the other day. As tens of thousands of people across Australia’s south east spent the weekend washing mud off, piling waste on the side of the road and completing insurance claims, having got myself back together, I offer to help YOU PEPP® up.

It might literally be you personally, or you and your team.

I work with individuals one on one or as part of a group and I speak with organisations large and small. Please reach out if you need assistance with anything… I’ll help if I can – book a timeslot for a chat about which support option will suit you best.