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