As I was having dinner earlier tonight, I got a message from Pete telling me that the Life Coaches Blog was down!
At that moment, a very loud, and very clear voice inside my head went, ‘Oh shit.’
I was out and still had a few errands to run before I could get back home to check on the site. As the Life Coaches Blog’s sole administrator, I started to get worried. What had happpened?
The jaws of fear started to gnaw at me. You see, I had been tweaking a sister site the night before and I suspected that due to a late night oversight on my part, I had accidentally deleted some of Life Coaches Blog’s files.
Oh no.
Talk about an exercise in state management!
I knew that getting worried and frustrated wouldn’t help me as I went through my errands, so I postponed my worries, telling myself again and again ‘not now, I’ll deal with it later’ whenever I started to feel anxious.
When I got home and finally got to check on Life Coaches Blog, my worst fears were confirmed. I had accidentally deleted hours and hours of hard work for which I had no backup, without which Life Coaches Blog could not function properly.
Bwaaaaaargh!
I could hear a tsunami of devastation coming to get me. Firstly, I was angry at myself for having made such a silly but tremendous mistake. Secondly, I was feeling overwhelmed at the amount of work I knew was lying before me I had to get done by the night.
With those heavily negative emotions looming, I almost wanted to give up right there and then.
I knew I had to change my state fast, even though a part of me didn’t want to. And something that’s always worked for me as a fast and sure state changer was music, so I turned up the iTunes and pumped up the volume.
And then I told myself, ok, let’s just take things one step at a time. I looked at the morass of files, folders and code laid out in front of me and started with this simple question:
“What’s the very next step I can take to make this better?”
And I focused my attention on just that one next step. And after that, the next one step. There were times I looked at how badly the site was still turning up and the problems I kept getting and the tsunami of overwhelm threatened to beat me down over the head, but whenever that happened I just told myself; ‘Stop, worry later, what’s the very next step?’ And narrowed my focus to that.
And I’m glad to say I made it through and got most of the site back.
Yay.
Yay!
You’ll notice some differences here and there, it’s going to take a while more before I can tweak everything back to the way it used to be (or even better!), but we’re running.
And thanks to everyone who asked after us when we were gone 
November 28th, 2005 at 3:43 am
Well, it’s back and I’m glad. Though it speaks of a small weakness that we have in Alvin being the only administrator of this site.
In a good way, the calls that I’m getting and the emails hitting me about a blank screen since the morning…. well I’m like the atypical non-web person going: well it’s gonna be ok in a while. Took me more than 12 hours to raise the alarm.
Anyway, the concerns shown by all you concerned people is a testimony of the relationship we have build with you over the last two months.
For some of you, we have become a weekly or even daily staple. Thanks! A hiatus like this make sme wonder how else I can add value to the readers out there.
Thoughts?