What's your poison? - Mike Pagan

In the world of Superman kryptonite was his poison – all that strength and power and those super hero skills disappeared with the addition of just one ingredient. What’s your poison, that one thing that does it for you?

What’s your poison?

Everyone has something that gets under their skin and changes their focus, hunger or sends them off on a tangent. When you are at the bar and someone says, “what’s your poison?” they are generally asking what you’d like to drink not what Russian contraband have you smuggled into the country recently!

The skill is to know what the poison is for you. Each of us are wired differently, have our own strengths and weaknesses and of course the ability to distract ourselves in very different ways to the next person. It’s time to be honest with yourself and know your poison.

Consider the list below, some are clearly distraction challenges, others are self-manifested problems and finally just plain old bad habits. What’s your poison – how does it affect you and how good are you at seeing it coming in advance and taking steps to prevent it from happening?

Digital addiction, checking your phone and relevant statuses 30+ times a day. This rises to 80+ for certain age brackets.
Food and nutrition, we could talk about this for ages – what are you doing? Body balance, fitness, fatness etc? Nobody is perfect, that’s not the aim – how bad are you though?
Time for another coffee, tea, glass of water, getting up and down for the sake of it!
Desk fidgets that result in random walkabout with no point, direction or purpose – we know its not management by walking about!
Cleaning stuff – not saying cleaning is a poisonous activity, however many look for things to do such as cleaning so they are busy doing stuff but not necessarily what is either important or urgent.
Dog walk – if I do it now then I don’t have to do it later, comes under the same category of doing the shopping, these can be great ways of breaking state and changing your head space which is good, however that’s not always the case when we choose to do it?
Just checking the front door or the car is locked for the 5th time, not to mention the oven or the iron is turned off. Self-inflicted stress buttons that can ruin a day (made worse still if the house has been burgled by the time you get home)
The Mood Hoover that you are not coping with, managing or trying to work with can cost you days of productivity and angst.
Facebook – it’s been 30 seconds since digital addiction was mentioned earlier in the newsletter, sadly you have automatically checked the phone again.
Sitting in the lounge with your laptop again at 11pm, still working, having grunted at the family, played lip service to your partner and are totally exhausted.
Alcohol in moderation, in binge format or too much habitually – abstinence is not the call here, knowing your body, your tolerance levels and recovery time is the important thing.

Prevention is always better than the cure so they say. Taking action or not taking action is a choice. Reading to the bottom of this page was a choice for you, the question is what choices are you going to make to help you avoid, recalibrate or dilute your poison? Superman could deal with kryptonite when it was sealed inside a lead box – what or who is going to provide you with the necessary support to build the lead box you require? Ask for help from friends, family, me or somebody else – just make sure you ask! Good luck being more productive and FAFF free – www.stopfaffingabout.com