In football, there is no better time to have the ball. You can never have more plays at your disposal than on “First and 10.” That doesn’t mean that you have the best field position, nor does it mean that you have all the time you need. What it means is that you have four plays to get 10 yards or score. For purposes of this column, it represents a fresh start.
Is there a day of the week that is hated more than Mondays? For most people, Monday represent not only the beginning of the work week, but the farthest point away from the end of the work week. Without the right attitude, Mondays can be pretty tough on a person. That is especially true when things don’t all go the way they are supposed to go. When things go bad, Mondays can be the worst. In my lifetime, I have experienced my share of bad Mondays. In the 17 years, I have been practicing law, I have on more than one occasion cursed the light of the sunrise on a Monday morning.
In fact, complaining about Mondays was the norm for me until a couple of years ago. The thing that changed for me was the way I looked at Monday and especially the way I prepared for it. Monday is like First and 10. Monday is nothing more than a fresh start and fresh starts are great. Fresh starts are even better when you have prepared properly for them and have a plan of attack. Without a plan, it is easy to fall into a quagmire made up of Monday’s normal problems combined with the ones that were not anticipated but always come.
I have tried to make sure that I am ready for everything that I know is coming for the next week before I even get to the Friday before. Sometimes, the preparation must be done on the weekend, but the trick is to arrive at work on Monday as prepared as possible. As was the credo of the great Coach John Wooden: “Preparation prevents poor performance.” Not only does preparation prevent poor performance, it also makes a good or even great performance much easier and certainly more likely.
Ironically, the idea that preparation and attitude will make things easier for you in your life is not exactly true. The trick to making your Mondays more enjoyable may mean working much harder through the week and meeting deadlines prior to their arrival.
The secret to less stress may be as simple as harder work. Stress often rears its ugly head at those times when your lack of preparation intersects with unforeseen and unanticipated problems. The winner of a marathon is more likely to be the person that trained harder rather than the one that took it easy.
Recently, my Mondays took on an additional stressor. The deadlines for this column was moved back to Monday morning in order to make the Chattanooga paper. This means that my deadline is now two days earlier than it was before. As I write this on Monday morning, minutes before I am supposed to be in Court for a hearing, I realize that I need to start practicing a little bit of what I am preaching when it comes to my columns. On a positive note, as long as we are around, there will always be another Monday. Mondays are good for fresh starts, no matter how bad you handled last week. Everyone deserves a fresh start; that is especially true for those of us way up in the CHEAP SEATS!