Stay Sane This Holiday Season

Hey, my friend Kenny Chapman here, the blue collar coach with a little Christmas week message for you. Here we are. It's the holidays. Now here's the question. How do I stay sane? And you might be going well, Kenny, I'm asked that question every single week. How am I going to stay sane this week? Well, this week's a little bit different because it's Christmas week, it's family week, it's holiday week, it's festive week. It's all these types of things. And many of your peers, hopefully not colleagues, because we're all still running and open and everything, but many people have checked out. You're already done for the year, this and that. So I want to just touch base. Four things. We're normally talking about leadership, marketing, sales with my weekly blog here, but this time I want to talk about you as a person and how you can succeed in the next two weeks. Number one, set your intention for how you want your holiday to be. Set your intention of how your relationships are going to unfold. Set your intention with how things are going to be for you. You have the personal power to make holidays anything and everything that you want. But many of us fall victim. We fall victim to wishing that we had things that we don't. We fall victim to the retail everything coming at us. We fall victim to seeing family members that maybe we wouldn't have chose, but we still get to see them and have interactions. Right? Set your intention. Take ownership. Take responsibility. This is your holiday. Create it however you want want. Second thing, slow down. Okay? You just got to take a moment. I'm coming to you here from the lovely Kristi and I's Christmas headquarters. You can see our awesome Christmas tree back behind us and we talk about it. You know, we work at home a lot. I work at the office some. I work home a lot. And she mainly works at home. And it's like sometimes you'll realize, boom, there went five hours and I never even noticed the Christmas tree. And we're going to be taking it down in a couple weeks. Slow down, be in the moment, take your time back. We talk about there's no such thing as time management. You can only manage yourself. So this time of year, slow down and enjoy this time. It only comes once a year. Third thing, don't take things personally if people get upset. Many people are so stressed out this time of year, so many things going on, so much pressure. You know, we've all heard these statistics that suicide rates are up during December and all that's actually a fallacy. It's not a true statistic if you do the research on it. But what does it mean? It means people automatically go, yeah, things are hard, things are tough, therefore they get stressed, therefore they lash out, therefore they say things, therefore they drink too much. Therefore things come out that don't always come out. Don't take it personally. It's not about you. It's about where they're at, what's going on within them. Just be grateful to have the opportunity, and that's the last thing I want to leave you with, is be grateful. You're here for a reason. You have this season. We don't know how many more we have, but you have this one. You get the opportunity to enjoy it, to explore it, to embrace it, to love those around you, to love your team members, love your clients, feel good. If you're watching this right now, you're probably in the United States, Canada, the uk, Australia, and you've got it better than most. You've got some choices that a lot of people don't have. My friends, take control back this week. Enjoy this time of year because 2016 will be here just before you know it. Practice these four things. Embrace it. Love yourself first. Let that go to others and enjoy your holiday season. I'm Kenny Chapman, the blue collar coach. Until we talk again, my friend, have a better than fantastic holiday season and we'll see you soon.