If there’s one thing that is never conducive to good business, it’s being plagued with too much drama!

If drama with your clients, business partners, or vendors – or within yourself – prevents you from sustaining or growing your business, there are actions you can take and mental adjustments you can make that will help you ditch drama in your business and life.

Realize That The Drama You Experience Is YOUR Experience

You experience none of your feelings or emotions outside of you. Every feeling and emotion you feel is an internal event, which means you create them. Thousands of things can trigger your feelings and emotions. However, it is your choice how strongly certain things trigger you, and how long you remain affected by them.

It is a challenge, no doubt about that.

When you feel the signs of drama, ask yourself: What is the cost of getting into it, for you and your business? While you don’t get to choose all the experiences you have, you get to choose what you do with them. You can always improve your skills to deal with adversity. You have free will to choose either the challenge of not getting involved in a drama, or allowing drama and paying a different price for it.

Gain Clarity About What’s Really Going On

Lack of clarity and ignoring the facts of what really “is” gets you stuck in “should” thinking. That easily creates unnecessary drama.

Gaining clarity improves the quality of your thinking, and enhances your ability for skilful analysis and assessment. Clarity is essential to effective problem-solving and decision-making abilities, which prevent drama from developing and can resolve it quickly.

Critical thinking and socratic interviewing¹ are powerful methods to gain clarity, by asking vital questions in a clear and precise manner to gather relevant information. Critical thinking helps you evaluate your understanding of the facts – and your unquestioned beliefs – and examine why are you acting and reacting in certain ways. Asking the right critical questions from others helps them give clear answers and verify information, which prevents misunderstandings.

Clarity of the facts and awareness of your own thinking enable you to make choices that neutralize drama.

Be Impeccable With Your Words

In The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, the first agreement Ruiz prescribes is to be impeccable with our words. Words are powerful. Being impeccable with your words and speaking with integrity require courage, but so does everything that gives you power.

Stop wasting your energy and attention in negative self-talk or gossiping about others. Make it your constant practice (and a chosen challenge) to use words as agreements, and say only what you mean. And do what you say you’d do. That prevents the majority of drama from seeding in your business.

Take 100% Responsibility For Your Own Response

We often confuse fault and responsibility. Taking 100% responsibility doesn’t mean things that appear bad at this moment in your business are all your fault. They are not. You can control or influence but a few variables. Many events are beyond our control. There are ill-willed people around. And there are good people, whose well-intended actions didn’t work as planned. You might be one of them. It is, however, your responsibility to deal with the current situation. You chose the position with that responsibility when you started your business.

You could use the ‘not-so-pleasant’ experiences as excuses, making them emotional triggers when you want to vent or pity yourself. Or, you could attempt to hide or ignore them, which always seem to get these experiences to re-appear. Or, you can take 100% responsibility, dealing with what is and ditching the drama you could easily attach with it.

Accepting full responsibility without linking it to blame immediately releases lots of potential drama. Taking 100% responsibility for your own response to events and happenings decreases drama even further. Allowing others to take 100% responsibility for their own response practically vanishes drama from your life.

Disengage From Drama-Inducing Patterns

Some thoughts and actions support drama. Other thoughts and actions have the opposite effect. To experience less drama, you must disengage yourself and your business from what induces drama.

Drama-inducing patterns include:

• Doing things, believing it’s something you “must” or “should” do

• Poor or missing business rules, standards, and values, and communication thereof

• Accepting clients without assessing their situation, attitude, and personality – and qualifying them as a good prospective client

• High tolerance for violations of your personal boundaries or values

• Distracting yourself with excessive projects, overworking, and over-committing

• Sleeping too little, poor eating habits, skipping exercise, straining relationships

• Not asking for help or support due to pride, shame, guilt, or exhaustion

Harvest And Apply Wisdom From Your Past Experiences

Wisdom always comes from understanding things through your own experiences, working with clients, business development, orchestrating everything that must be done in your business for fulfilling the promises and attaining outcomes.

All you have done in your business and in other areas of your life have given you a rich pool of experiences with learning opportunities. Some of our most unpleasant and painful experiences has made us learn the most. Don’t look at your past experiences with dissatisfaction, but as your own reserve of wisdom you can use now and in creating more outcomes you desire.

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