106. Project Panic: Navigate Hiccups While Staying Calm
Do project hiccups send you into a panic spiral? Do you lose sleep over burst pipes or damaged flooring, wishing everything would just go smoothly for once? As an interior design business CEO, you’ve probably experienced these moments of anxiety and self-doubt when things don't go according to plan.
In this episode, I answer a question from a listener who struggles with staying calm and collected when project issues arise. We often absorb the stress of these hiccups to shield our clients from them. However, things are most definitely going to go wrong at some point - whether it’s at the project site, during a presentation, or even in response to a client’s reaction. So how can we learn to ride the emotional waves ourselves?
Listen in this week as I share practical strategies for managing your mindset when the unexpected happens. You'll learn how to separate facts from stories and how to tune into your body to process emotions. With these skills, along with realistic expectations, you’ll be better prepared to navigate project challenges with greater ease and resilience moving forward.
If you're interested in working together one-on-one in the fall or winter, now is the time to put your name on the waitlist for private coaching. Click here to secure your spot!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why trying to avoid project hiccups is futile.
How to approach projects with gentle neutrality instead of expecting perfection.
The difference between facts and stories, and how to separate them.
Why panic and anxiety make it harder to problem-solve effectively.
How to tune into your body to process and release difficult emotions.
Why embracing your emotions is the most efficient thing you can do when faced with a challenge.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 106. In this one I’m going to be answering a question I received on Instagram from a listener about how to handle moments of panic when there is a project hiccup, because let’s be real, there’s going to be some project hiccups. It’s something we have to learn to ride the wave of and support ourselves through. It was such a great question that I had to bring it onto the podcast and I can’t wait to dive in.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I’m sitting down here for the first time in a little while. I just got back from fall break with my family. We went out to Palm Springs in California, which is one of our favorite places to hang out. And we had a wonderful time getting to spend time with each other, see some extended family while we were out there.
I got to do one of my favorite things, which is scoping out different yoga and Pilates studios when we travel. I found this really amazing Pilates studio that was only a five minute drive from where we were staying. So I had so much fun going there. And now we’re back and fortunately, there isn’t a huge contrast. Well, of course there’s contrast between it being quite hot out there and it’s not super hot here, but sometimes when we come back from those trips, it is brutal here. It feels like a totally different climate. And I’m so glad that nature is letting us settle into the fall season.
Today, what I want to talk about is a question that I got from an interior designer on Instagram about handling project hiccups. I do have an episode on when things go wrong and what to do about it, how to help yourself through those moments, episode 42. But what we’re going to talk about today is more the mental and emotional component of when things go wrong and you’re spinning and feeling kind of panicky and anxiety ridden and how to lead yourself through that.
Before we dive into that topic, I want to give a shout out to Jen Richards, who left a review on the podcast. She titled it nurturing voice with powerful messages. Jen said, “Desi’s podcast is very calming and encouraging. You will end up with helpful thought bubbles and hope for your business, as opposed to some other shows that have left me in a spiral of comparison and a long list of to-do’s. She brings so many relevant topics to the conversation with her experience as an interior designer and vast knowledge as a coach behind them. I’m so grateful to be able to tune in and listen.”
Thank you so much, Jen, for leaving that wonderful review. I’m so glad you’re enjoying the show. And I want to give a huge reminder to everyone who is listening. If you have not rated and reviewed the show, what are you waiting for? This is going to be your last chance to enter the giveaway that I’m hosting for winning a one-on-one coaching session with me.
All you have to do is rate and review the show wherever it is that you’re listening. And then you can take a screenshot and send it to me on Instagram, or you can email me at desiid.com to show me that you entered. The giveaway is going to be done next Wednesday, November 6th. And after that, the giveaway for the private coaching session will be complete.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do next for a giveaway, or if I’m going to bring back the one-on-one giveaway at some point. So now is the time if you want some support with your business, with your specific challenge, definitely take a moment. It really only takes a moment to leave that rating and review and let me know that you did so. It is a huge help to me as I help spread the word about the podcast. And then I want to give you a thank you for taking the time to do that.
Let’s dive into the specific question that I received over on Instagram. And this designer said, “How does one not feel anguish every time a hiccup occurs on one of my projects? I keep wanting everything to happen smoothly, and I can’t seem to take sudden things like a burst pipe or damaged piece of flooring as part of the process. I flip every single time and I lose sleep.” I think we can all relate to this question.
Things definitely are going to go wrong on a design or construction project. It could be at the project site, it could be during a presentation even. Maybe the client doesn’t react the way you anticipate or the way you want them to, or maybe you don’t have an on-the-spot answer to a question that a client asks. You’re getting ready for a furniture installation and realize you or the receiver missed some damage.
I mean, I could just go on and on. There are going to be hiccups along the way. That is just the nature of what we do in the interior design industry. And also part of a huge value that we provide to our clients is that we’re there to absorb the hiccups and help smooth them out for the client. But that means we also need to learn to smooth those hiccups out for ourselves.
Often when these hiccups occur, we will experience a heightened emotional state. This listener described it as panic, but it could definitely manifest as worry, self-doubt, anxiety, even fear. All of those really big emotions we tend to like to avoid. They tend to not feel very good so we want to try and shove them away. And one of the ways that we do that is trying to avoid having the hiccups happen. Because if we don’t have a circumstance where we have to react to those or our body just automatically reacts to them, it is a little bit easier.
But again, like I said, it’s just not possible to avoid every last little thing that could go wrong. Sometimes things are just out of our control. Throughout this episode, I’m going to mostly refer to the feeling of panic because that’s what this particular interior designer noted as her emotion and she gave us an example. But know that you can insert whatever icky emotion you identify with most throughout this episode as we’re talking about what happens when we get those big feelings when things go wrong.
I kind of already alluded to this in the beginning, right, there’s some good news and there’s some bad news here. The first is that things are just going to happen. That’s part of the process. And we really can’t avoid those emotions. So I guess the good news, maybe comforting news is that it happens. It’s going to happen. It happens to lots of interior designers, every interior designer we could say. But what you might think is the bad news is that we can’t really avoid these emotions.
We can try to distract ourselves from these emotions. We can try and push them away. We can avoid them to a certain extent. But the thing with emotions is that they don’t permanently disappear unless you process through them. That’s why we really have to shift from believing that the solution is to just try and not have these emotional experiences, but to knowing how to partner with our brain and body when these emotional experiences inevitably arise.
There are so many variables and people involved in a design or construction project. Like I said, things are bound to go sideways from time to time. No matter how carefully you’ve tried to control the conditions and no matter how much experience you have, they’re going to come up. And I happen to know that the designer who submitted this question has an established firm and lots of experience.
And as I’m talking through this and sharing this with you, I’m even thinking about how often we have things really buttoned up. It’s not even the anxiety, the panic, the worry about the things that have actually gone wrong, but it’s all of those emotions that we experience about what could go wrong. So even if there’s not an actual acute issue you’re solving for, you can still apply whatever it is that I’m sharing here today to manage that emotional process.
The first step in learning to ride the emotional waves and roller coaster, we might describe it as, I think waves, rolling waves sounds a little bit more pleasant, of executing a design project is to stop expecting it to be perfect or even entertaining the idea that one day it will be flawless and seamless.
If any of you are familiar with Byron Katie, she is famous for her four questions and the turnaround. You can always Google her, but she has this great phrase. When you argue with reality, you’ll lose every time. That’s what happens when we expect everything to go perfectly on a design project, we lose the argument with reality.
This isn’t to say don’t take steps to minimize the hiccups, which will give you less things to potentially panic about. Of course, you want to learn to do this, you want to execute those systems. You’re going to grow in your expertise and as the leader of design projects and as the leader of your business. But when you drop the fantasy circumstance of everything going perfectly all the time and accept that at times things will go wrong, that you might feel anxious or panicky some of the time, you’re actually going to lessen the amount of panic you feel.
It’s almost like we start to panic about the panic, right? And then make that a compounding emotional experience that we don’t really want to have. I want to clarify, this is different from walking around always expecting the worst and planning for disaster. And if that’s you, definitely go listen to episode 76 when you’re done with this one, where I talk about planning for best case scenarios.
What I’m talking about here is a gentle neutrality that we bring to the potentials that exist in the execution of a design project. The example that’s coming to mind right now is when you have a newborn baby, and the newborn baby needs to eat and then sleep all the time, right? And it rarely sleeps through the night and it’s waking up every few hours, at least that was my experience. It’s kind of like being mad at the baby for waking up when that’s just what babies do. They need to wake up. They need to eat every few hours. And you expect when you have a baby that it’s going to do those things.
You’re going to try and support it through the process. You’re going to, you know, I hear the SNOO is all the rage right now, this like thing that rocks the baby. You might buy some equipment, you might have a certain bedtime routine, but you’re not going to get mad at the baby for waking up. You might wish the baby didn’t wake up, you might be tired because the baby woke up, but you don’t get mad at the baby for just being a baby.
It’s kind of the same thing with your projects. You can do what you can control to help make it a smooth process, and also approach it with the knowledge of things sometimes go wrong. So that’s that gentle neutrality that I’m talking about.
The second strategy you can use to guide yourself through these moments of panic and those hiccups is to separate the facts from the story that you’re telling about those facts. This is going to also help you create that neutrality and calm your emotional state when something does go wrong. If you’re newer to the podcast, you might not have heard me talking about separating out the facts from the story, so let me just talk about that for a little bit here with some examples.
The facts are what we could all agree on. Examples of this might be the temperature is 60 degrees right now at the time of this recording. The invoice that you sent on October 21st was for an amount of $100,000. Or at your meeting that you just had, the client said the words, “I wish this was already done.”
Those are facts. We could look at the thermometer or your phone. We could look at your bookkeeping software. We could have been there hearing with our ears at the meeting when the client said those words.
Then there’s the story, and the story is what you make the facts mean. This is what we’re all out in the world doing every single day, encountering facts and making them mean something. If the fact is that you can open your weather app and it shows that it’s 60 degrees, you might make that mean that it’s warm or it’s cold. If the client says the words, “I wish this was already done,” your brain’s perception or story of those words might be, she thinks I’m not doing a good job. Or you might interpret it as something more benign, like, yes, I totally wish this was done too.
Our emotions then come from the story being created by our brain. This is so important to understand because if we pause, take a step back and separate out the facts from the story, we can start to see things more clearly. When we experience feelings such as panic or anxiety that are created from the stories that we tell about the facts we encounter, the part of our brain that is responsible for logical thinking, the prefrontal cortex, actually becomes less active and the amygdala starts to take over. It becomes the more active part of the brain we’re using.
That’s when we really start feeling like, emergency. So not only do we feel worse when this part of the brain is active, and maybe we have trouble sleeping, having looping thoughts, we start to spiral. We’re actually less equipped to solve for whatever hiccup has occurred because that prefrontal cortex is not as active.
The way that we can calm down that amygdala and start to get out of the emergency mode is to bring it back to the facts, to ground ourselves in what is true in the present moment. When something does go wrong, like the listener shared, the pipe bursts, or there’s damage to the flooring, we want to first break it down to the facts and ask yourself, what am I making this mean? It could be about myself, about the project, about the business, and take a look at what is actually happening and what’s the story you’re telling.
Sometimes just seeing that separation is enough to just drop you back into the present moment where you can feel a little bit more calm and a little bit more grounded. Sometimes too, what we see is that what we’re making the facts mean is just total nonsense. Think of the pipe bursting example. Maybe the fact that the pipe burst, we’re making that mean that we should have anticipated that. But we could look at that and go, well, maybe not. Maybe it really was a random thing, and I’m putting a completely unrealistic expectation on myself, that of being a fortune teller.
Just acknowledging the story can really be enough to settle you back into that present moment, so I want you to explore that this week and see how the distinction between fact versus story can lessen the emotional charge and help you move forward with whatever you need to do then to solve for the challenge.
In episode two, which I titled Overwhelm is Optional, I teach you more on this coaching tool that I share with clients called the self-coaching model. If you haven’t listened to that one, or it’s been a while and you’re intrigued by this concept of thoughts create feelings, drive actions, and actions create results, you’ll want to revisit that episode.
The last thing I want to encourage you to do in moments of panic, stress, or anxiety is to embrace the emotion. I know some designers when they first encounter me, they’re surprised that as a business coach, I teach a lot on emotions and work with my clients a lot on processing emotion. But learning to be with your internal experience of feelings without resistance and reactivity is one of the greatest and longest lasting benefits of the work I do with clients.
We’re going to have emotions. You are not a robot, I like to remind people that. But you as the CEO cannot run your business fueled by emotions, especially the super reactive emotions that we’re talking about today. When you notice that you’re reacting negatively to something that’s happened that you wish did not happen on a project, it is an opportunity and time to tune into your body.
Notice where in the body you feel the emotional charge. This is another strategy for bringing you back into the present moment and calming your body down so that you can access that higher level thinking that’s required when you need to problem solve. A really simple practice is just to notice where you feel the emotion in your body. You can ask yourself if the emotion has a shape or if it has any type of movement or vibration or a pulse you can identify.
And as you notice what’s happening as an internal experience in your body, not thinking about what’s happening in your body, but actually noticing the sensations, you want to keep breathing and bringing your awareness to the spot in the body where you experience that emotional state. The key here is that I’m talking about naming and noticing physical sensations, not looping in a story like I’m so anxious. I hate how this feels. This is awful.
Those types of stories are going to help perpetuate the feeling of the panic, anxiety, stress, whatever it is that you’re experiencing. When we focus our awareness and our breath on and into the body, the emotional charge will naturally begin to dissipate. It just happens.
And it might resurface, right? You might be feeling calm and then there’s a spike of panic. It might happen, but then you just bring your awareness and breath back into the body. Most of us have been taught to avoid or push down emotions, but that really only perpetuates them.
I’m thinking of how the listener shared that she loses sleep when these types of things happen. That’s happening because of resistance to the emotional experience. It’s kind of trying to pop back up when the body is in a calmer state so that it can be addressed. It wants to be addressed. It’s kind of like when you try and shove a beach ball underwater, it takes a lot of effort and force to hold that blown up ball underneath the surface. And as soon as you stop pushing down, the ball is going to pop right back up.
It’s the same thing with our emotions. If we let them be the beach ball floating on top of the water, that’s that going into your body with awareness and breath. That’s the beach ball floating on the water. We allow the emotions to settle and gently be. And that actually ends up taking a lot less effort.
This can be kind of uncomfortable at first, I’ll give you the heads up on that. Because we’re not used to feeling the emotions. Our mind has that story that if we allow the emotions to be present, we’re going to be swallowed by them, or we’re not going to be able to function, or it’s going to take so much time to deal with this emotional experience. But actually it’s the opposite.
And as you practice this process that I’ve given you, you’re just going to naturally experience a lesser degree of low lows, and then also recover from the lows with more ease and less time. And while it might be counterintuitive, the more that you learn to ride these emotional waves in your business, the more you’re able to actually experience the joy and the fulfillment and the pleasure that you can partake in with running your design business because when we mute one area of emotion, one area on the emotional scale, meaning those lower degree emotions, we actually end up muting the higher ones as well.
One tip for getting your brain on board with playing with this emotional processing technique that I shared of tuning into the body is to remind yourself that while tuning into the emotion and feeling the anxiety can be a little uncomfortable at first because it’s unfamiliar, remind yourself that the feeling of panic, while also simultaneously wishing it would go away or telling yourself you shouldn’t be feeling that way also feels pretty awful.
The difference between these two experiences is if you learn to allow the emotion to be present, it’s going to help you feel better. While staying in resistance and reactivity to the emotion is only going to perpetuate the negative emotional experience that you don’t want to have and is getting in the way of you moving forward and finding solutions and just moving on with your day or getting a good night’s sleep.
With time and some patience, you’ll teach your body that it’s safe to have the experience you’re having and find that embracing emotions is the most efficient thing you can do when faced with a challenge. It’s a way of creating a sense of safety and groundedness in your business as the CEO.
I know we’ve covered a lot today, so I want to recap what to do when there is a project hiccup and you experience some panic. And you can, of course, always go back and re-listen to this episode when the actual situation is present if you need a reminder.
The first thing you need to do is accept that hiccups are part of being an interior designer and running a business. The second thing is to separate out the facts from the story. What is actually happening here? And what is my mind telling me about it? And then number three is you want to embrace the emotional experience by tuning into your body with awareness and breath.
When you follow this process or even just use little pieces of what I’ve shared, you’re going to radically shift your experience of running complex projects and how you show up for your business as the designer and as the CEO. You’re going to establish a greater sense of self-trust and confidence, knowing that you can figure it out and also trusting and knowing that you can handle whatever emotions come your way.
You’re also going to be such a higher level problem solver and really shine with clients when things do go wrong. I actually think that some of the most memorable customer service experiences I’ve had are when things have gone wrong and the person on the other side of that has risen to the occasion and made it right. Even more so than just having something where it just is totally seamless and flawless.
I think those experiences can be very memorable, but I think how you show up in the face of a challenge can really show your clients who you are and what you’re capable of. And that really creates a sense of trust in that relationship.
Also, when you become a better problem solver and aren’t trying to resist what happened, you’re going to be more willing to look for the lessons and implement them to prevent future mistakes if it’s something that could have been anticipated, but got overlooked, or it was something that slipped through the cracks.
You’re also going to be able to save yourself so much time. You’re going to be able to get into action quicker and you won’t spend time frozen in inaction or spend time in avoidant activities, spinning your wheels, looping in your thoughts. Think of all the time you spend when you’re feeling anxious or feeling panicked, doing things that don’t need to be done or like scrolling Instagram or allowing yourself to take more time on emails or some other activity that just doesn’t need to be done because you’re just trying to avoid what it is that’s happening for you in the present moment.
And lastly, you’re just going to feel so much better in and out of work because let’s face it, when something’s going wrong in our business, whether that is with a project or it’s something internally, those feelings definitely tend to follow you outside of the office. I think it’s pretty rare that we can be completely compartmentalized and say like that is there and this is here.
So when you learn to ride those emotional waves and embrace the emotional experience that is consistent with entrepreneurship and running a business and running these projects, you’re going to allow yourself to feel more present in your life, not stuck or distracted. And you’re going to sleep more soundly and work with more focus when you’re working without the worries constantly looping in your brain.
The impact of what we’ve covered today will have a huge impact on your ability to be an effective business owner, project leader, and will no doubt have a ripple effect into your personal life as well. Because let’s face it, life throws us curve balls as well.
Of course, if this is something you’d like support with, I would love to be your coach. You can add your name to the waitlist for private coaching, the website for that is desiid.com/privatecoachingwaitlist. You can also head over to my main site, which is desicreswell.com, click on the coaching tab, which has been completely refreshed and updated and you’ll be able to learn all the nuts and bolts of one-on-one coaching, how I approach business coaching specifically for interior designers, and then add your name to the waitlist from there so you’re the first to know when spots become available.
Before we wrap up, a quick reminder that when you leave a rating and review for the podcast and send me a quick screenshot, either Instagram or at desiid.com, you’ll be entered to win a private coaching session with me. We can even work on this exact topic. The giveaway is ending next Wednesday, November 6th, so get your review in now if you want to be entered.
And lastly, I’ll just say, I loved getting this question on Instagram. It was such a fun topic to dive into. And I have no doubt that you might have a question brewing yourself. So if you want to submit your very own question, just send me a message, @desicreswell is my Instagram handle. And if it seems like something that would be applicable to lots of designers, which I’m guessing it will be, then I will create an episode for you.
All right, that’s what I’ve got for today. I’ll be back next week with a brand new episode. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week.
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Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I’m sitting down here for the first time in a little while. I just got back from fall break with my family. We went out to Palm Springs in California, which is one of our favorite places to hang out. And we had a wonderful time getting to spend time with each other, see some extended family while we were out there.
I got to do one of my favorite things, which is scoping out different yoga and Pilates studios when we travel. I found this really amazing Pilates studio that was only a five minute drive from where we were staying. So I had so much fun going there. And now we’re back and fortunately, there isn’t a huge contrast. Well, of course there’s contrast between it being quite hot out there and it’s not super hot here, but sometimes when we come back from those trips, it is brutal here. It feels like a totally different climate. And I’m so glad that nature is letting us settle into the fall season.
Today, what I want to talk about is a question that I got from an interior designer on Instagram about handling project hiccups. I do have an episode on when things go wrong and what to do about it, how to help yourself through those moments, episode 42. But what we’re going to talk about today is more the mental and emotional component of when things go wrong and you’re spinning and feeling kind of panicky and anxiety ridden and how to lead yourself through that.
Before we dive into that topic, I want to give a shout out to Jen Richards, who left a review on the podcast. She titled it nurturing voice with powerful messages. Jen said, “Desi’s podcast is very calming and encouraging. You will end up with helpful thought bubbles and hope for your business, as opposed to some other shows that have left me in a spiral of comparison and a long list of to-do’s. She brings so many relevant topics to the conversation with her experience as an interior designer and vast knowledge as a coach behind them. I’m so grateful to be able to tune in and listen.”
Thank you so much, Jen, for leaving that wonderful review. I’m so glad you’re enjoying the show. And I want to give a huge reminder to everyone who is listening. If you have not rated and reviewed the show, what are you waiting for? This is going to be your last chance to enter the giveaway that I’m hosting for winning a one-on-one coaching session with me.
All you have to do is rate and review the show wherever it is that you’re listening. And then you can take a screenshot and send it to me on Instagram, or you can email me at desiid.com to show me that you entered. The giveaway is going to be done next Wednesday, November 6th. And after that, the giveaway for the private coaching session will be complete.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do next for a giveaway, or if I’m going to bring back the one-on-one giveaway at some point. So now is the time if you want some support with your business, with your specific challenge, definitely take a moment. It really only takes a moment to leave that rating and review and let me know that you did so. It is a huge help to me as I help spread the word about the podcast. And then I want to give you a thank you for taking the time to do that.
Let’s dive into the specific question that I received over on Instagram. And this designer said, “How does one not feel anguish every time a hiccup occurs on one of my projects? I keep wanting everything to happen smoothly, and I can’t seem to take sudden things like a burst pipe or damaged piece of flooring as part of the process. I flip every single time and I lose sleep.” I think we can all relate to this question.
Things definitely are going to go wrong on a design or construction project. It could be at the project site, it could be during a presentation even. Maybe the client doesn’t react the way you anticipate or the way you want them to, or maybe you don’t have an on-the-spot answer to a question that a client asks. You’re getting ready for a furniture installation and realize you or the receiver missed some damage.
I mean, I could just go on and on. There are going to be hiccups along the way. That is just the nature of what we do in the interior design industry. And also part of a huge value that we provide to our clients is that we’re there to absorb the hiccups and help smooth them out for the client. But that means we also need to learn to smooth those hiccups out for ourselves.
Often when these hiccups occur, we will experience a heightened emotional state. This listener described it as panic, but it could definitely manifest as worry, self-doubt, anxiety, even fear. All of those really big emotions we tend to like to avoid. They tend to not feel very good so we want to try and shove them away. And one of the ways that we do that is trying to avoid having the hiccups happen. Because if we don’t have a circumstance where we have to react to those or our body just automatically reacts to them, it is a little bit easier.
But again, like I said, it’s just not possible to avoid every last little thing that could go wrong. Sometimes things are just out of our control. Throughout this episode, I’m going to mostly refer to the feeling of panic because that’s what this particular interior designer noted as her emotion and she gave us an example. But know that you can insert whatever icky emotion you identify with most throughout this episode as we’re talking about what happens when we get those big feelings when things go wrong.
I kind of already alluded to this in the beginning, right, there’s some good news and there’s some bad news here. The first is that things are just going to happen. That’s part of the process. And we really can’t avoid those emotions. So I guess the good news, maybe comforting news is that it happens. It’s going to happen. It happens to lots of interior designers, every interior designer we could say. But what you might think is the bad news is that we can’t really avoid these emotions.
We can try to distract ourselves from these emotions. We can try and push them away. We can avoid them to a certain extent. But the thing with emotions is that they don’t permanently disappear unless you process through them. That’s why we really have to shift from believing that the solution is to just try and not have these emotional experiences, but to knowing how to partner with our brain and body when these emotional experiences inevitably arise.
There are so many variables and people involved in a design or construction project. Like I said, things are bound to go sideways from time to time. No matter how carefully you’ve tried to control the conditions and no matter how much experience you have, they’re going to come up. And I happen to know that the designer who submitted this question has an established firm and lots of experience.
And as I’m talking through this and sharing this with you, I’m even thinking about how often we have things really buttoned up. It’s not even the anxiety, the panic, the worry about the things that have actually gone wrong, but it’s all of those emotions that we experience about what could go wrong. So even if there’s not an actual acute issue you’re solving for, you can still apply whatever it is that I’m sharing here today to manage that emotional process.
The first step in learning to ride the emotional waves and roller coaster, we might describe it as, I think waves, rolling waves sounds a little bit more pleasant, of executing a design project is to stop expecting it to be perfect or even entertaining the idea that one day it will be flawless and seamless.
If any of you are familiar with Byron Katie, she is famous for her four questions and the turnaround. You can always Google her, but she has this great phrase. When you argue with reality, you’ll lose every time. That’s what happens when we expect everything to go perfectly on a design project, we lose the argument with reality.
This isn’t to say don’t take steps to minimize the hiccups, which will give you less things to potentially panic about. Of course, you want to learn to do this, you want to execute those systems. You’re going to grow in your expertise and as the leader of design projects and as the leader of your business. But when you drop the fantasy circumstance of everything going perfectly all the time and accept that at times things will go wrong, that you might feel anxious or panicky some of the time, you’re actually going to lessen the amount of panic you feel.
It’s almost like we start to panic about the panic, right? And then make that a compounding emotional experience that we don’t really want to have. I want to clarify, this is different from walking around always expecting the worst and planning for disaster. And if that’s you, definitely go listen to episode 76 when you’re done with this one, where I talk about planning for best case scenarios.
What I’m talking about here is a gentle neutrality that we bring to the potentials that exist in the execution of a design project. The example that’s coming to mind right now is when you have a newborn baby, and the newborn baby needs to eat and then sleep all the time, right? And it rarely sleeps through the night and it’s waking up every few hours, at least that was my experience. It’s kind of like being mad at the baby for waking up when that’s just what babies do. They need to wake up. They need to eat every few hours. And you expect when you have a baby that it’s going to do those things.
You’re going to try and support it through the process. You’re going to, you know, I hear the SNOO is all the rage right now, this like thing that rocks the baby. You might buy some equipment, you might have a certain bedtime routine, but you’re not going to get mad at the baby for waking up. You might wish the baby didn’t wake up, you might be tired because the baby woke up, but you don’t get mad at the baby for just being a baby.
It’s kind of the same thing with your projects. You can do what you can control to help make it a smooth process, and also approach it with the knowledge of things sometimes go wrong. So that’s that gentle neutrality that I’m talking about.
The second strategy you can use to guide yourself through these moments of panic and those hiccups is to separate the facts from the story that you’re telling about those facts. This is going to also help you create that neutrality and calm your emotional state when something does go wrong. If you’re newer to the podcast, you might not have heard me talking about separating out the facts from the story, so let me just talk about that for a little bit here with some examples.
The facts are what we could all agree on. Examples of this might be the temperature is 60 degrees right now at the time of this recording. The invoice that you sent on October 21st was for an amount of $100,000. Or at your meeting that you just had, the client said the words, “I wish this was already done.”
Those are facts. We could look at the thermometer or your phone. We could look at your bookkeeping software. We could have been there hearing with our ears at the meeting when the client said those words.
Then there’s the story, and the story is what you make the facts mean. This is what we’re all out in the world doing every single day, encountering facts and making them mean something. If the fact is that you can open your weather app and it shows that it’s 60 degrees, you might make that mean that it’s warm or it’s cold. If the client says the words, “I wish this was already done,” your brain’s perception or story of those words might be, she thinks I’m not doing a good job. Or you might interpret it as something more benign, like, yes, I totally wish this was done too.
Our emotions then come from the story being created by our brain. This is so important to understand because if we pause, take a step back and separate out the facts from the story, we can start to see things more clearly. When we experience feelings such as panic or anxiety that are created from the stories that we tell about the facts we encounter, the part of our brain that is responsible for logical thinking, the prefrontal cortex, actually becomes less active and the amygdala starts to take over. It becomes the more active part of the brain we’re using.
That’s when we really start feeling like, emergency. So not only do we feel worse when this part of the brain is active, and maybe we have trouble sleeping, having looping thoughts, we start to spiral. We’re actually less equipped to solve for whatever hiccup has occurred because that prefrontal cortex is not as active.
The way that we can calm down that amygdala and start to get out of the emergency mode is to bring it back to the facts, to ground ourselves in what is true in the present moment. When something does go wrong, like the listener shared, the pipe bursts, or there’s damage to the flooring, we want to first break it down to the facts and ask yourself, what am I making this mean? It could be about myself, about the project, about the business, and take a look at what is actually happening and what’s the story you’re telling.
Sometimes just seeing that separation is enough to just drop you back into the present moment where you can feel a little bit more calm and a little bit more grounded. Sometimes too, what we see is that what we’re making the facts mean is just total nonsense. Think of the pipe bursting example. Maybe the fact that the pipe burst, we’re making that mean that we should have anticipated that. But we could look at that and go, well, maybe not. Maybe it really was a random thing, and I’m putting a completely unrealistic expectation on myself, that of being a fortune teller.
Just acknowledging the story can really be enough to settle you back into that present moment, so I want you to explore that this week and see how the distinction between fact versus story can lessen the emotional charge and help you move forward with whatever you need to do then to solve for the challenge.
In episode two, which I titled Overwhelm is Optional, I teach you more on this coaching tool that I share with clients called the self-coaching model. If you haven’t listened to that one, or it’s been a while and you’re intrigued by this concept of thoughts create feelings, drive actions, and actions create results, you’ll want to revisit that episode.
The last thing I want to encourage you to do in moments of panic, stress, or anxiety is to embrace the emotion. I know some designers when they first encounter me, they’re surprised that as a business coach, I teach a lot on emotions and work with my clients a lot on processing emotion. But learning to be with your internal experience of feelings without resistance and reactivity is one of the greatest and longest lasting benefits of the work I do with clients.
We’re going to have emotions. You are not a robot, I like to remind people that. But you as the CEO cannot run your business fueled by emotions, especially the super reactive emotions that we’re talking about today. When you notice that you’re reacting negatively to something that’s happened that you wish did not happen on a project, it is an opportunity and time to tune into your body.
Notice where in the body you feel the emotional charge. This is another strategy for bringing you back into the present moment and calming your body down so that you can access that higher level thinking that’s required when you need to problem solve. A really simple practice is just to notice where you feel the emotion in your body. You can ask yourself if the emotion has a shape or if it has any type of movement or vibration or a pulse you can identify.
And as you notice what’s happening as an internal experience in your body, not thinking about what’s happening in your body, but actually noticing the sensations, you want to keep breathing and bringing your awareness to the spot in the body where you experience that emotional state. The key here is that I’m talking about naming and noticing physical sensations, not looping in a story like I’m so anxious. I hate how this feels. This is awful.
Those types of stories are going to help perpetuate the feeling of the panic, anxiety, stress, whatever it is that you’re experiencing. When we focus our awareness and our breath on and into the body, the emotional charge will naturally begin to dissipate. It just happens.
And it might resurface, right? You might be feeling calm and then there’s a spike of panic. It might happen, but then you just bring your awareness and breath back into the body. Most of us have been taught to avoid or push down emotions, but that really only perpetuates them.
I’m thinking of how the listener shared that she loses sleep when these types of things happen. That’s happening because of resistance to the emotional experience. It’s kind of trying to pop back up when the body is in a calmer state so that it can be addressed. It wants to be addressed. It’s kind of like when you try and shove a beach ball underwater, it takes a lot of effort and force to hold that blown up ball underneath the surface. And as soon as you stop pushing down, the ball is going to pop right back up.
It’s the same thing with our emotions. If we let them be the beach ball floating on top of the water, that’s that going into your body with awareness and breath. That’s the beach ball floating on the water. We allow the emotions to settle and gently be. And that actually ends up taking a lot less effort.
This can be kind of uncomfortable at first, I’ll give you the heads up on that. Because we’re not used to feeling the emotions. Our mind has that story that if we allow the emotions to be present, we’re going to be swallowed by them, or we’re not going to be able to function, or it’s going to take so much time to deal with this emotional experience. But actually it’s the opposite.
And as you practice this process that I’ve given you, you’re just going to naturally experience a lesser degree of low lows, and then also recover from the lows with more ease and less time. And while it might be counterintuitive, the more that you learn to ride these emotional waves in your business, the more you’re able to actually experience the joy and the fulfillment and the pleasure that you can partake in with running your design business because when we mute one area of emotion, one area on the emotional scale, meaning those lower degree emotions, we actually end up muting the higher ones as well.
One tip for getting your brain on board with playing with this emotional processing technique that I shared of tuning into the body is to remind yourself that while tuning into the emotion and feeling the anxiety can be a little uncomfortable at first because it’s unfamiliar, remind yourself that the feeling of panic, while also simultaneously wishing it would go away or telling yourself you shouldn’t be feeling that way also feels pretty awful.
The difference between these two experiences is if you learn to allow the emotion to be present, it’s going to help you feel better. While staying in resistance and reactivity to the emotion is only going to perpetuate the negative emotional experience that you don’t want to have and is getting in the way of you moving forward and finding solutions and just moving on with your day or getting a good night’s sleep.
With time and some patience, you’ll teach your body that it’s safe to have the experience you’re having and find that embracing emotions is the most efficient thing you can do when faced with a challenge. It’s a way of creating a sense of safety and groundedness in your business as the CEO.
I know we’ve covered a lot today, so I want to recap what to do when there is a project hiccup and you experience some panic. And you can, of course, always go back and re-listen to this episode when the actual situation is present if you need a reminder.
The first thing you need to do is accept that hiccups are part of being an interior designer and running a business. The second thing is to separate out the facts from the story. What is actually happening here? And what is my mind telling me about it? And then number three is you want to embrace the emotional experience by tuning into your body with awareness and breath.
When you follow this process or even just use little pieces of what I’ve shared, you’re going to radically shift your experience of running complex projects and how you show up for your business as the designer and as the CEO. You’re going to establish a greater sense of self-trust and confidence, knowing that you can figure it out and also trusting and knowing that you can handle whatever emotions come your way.
You’re also going to be such a higher level problem solver and really shine with clients when things do go wrong. I actually think that some of the most memorable customer service experiences I’ve had are when things have gone wrong and the person on the other side of that has risen to the occasion and made it right. Even more so than just having something where it just is totally seamless and flawless.
I think those experiences can be very memorable, but I think how you show up in the face of a challenge can really show your clients who you are and what you’re capable of. And that really creates a sense of trust in that relationship.
Also, when you become a better problem solver and aren’t trying to resist what happened, you’re going to be more willing to look for the lessons and implement them to prevent future mistakes if it’s something that could have been anticipated, but got overlooked, or it was something that slipped through the cracks.
You’re also going to be able to save yourself so much time. You’re going to be able to get into action quicker and you won’t spend time frozen in inaction or spend time in avoidant activities, spinning your wheels, looping in your thoughts. Think of all the time you spend when you’re feeling anxious or feeling panicked, doing things that don’t need to be done or like scrolling Instagram or allowing yourself to take more time on emails or some other activity that just doesn’t need to be done because you’re just trying to avoid what it is that’s happening for you in the present moment.
And lastly, you’re just going to feel so much better in and out of work because let’s face it, when something’s going wrong in our business, whether that is with a project or it’s something internally, those feelings definitely tend to follow you outside of the office. I think it’s pretty rare that we can be completely compartmentalized and say like that is there and this is here.
So when you learn to ride those emotional waves and embrace the emotional experience that is consistent with entrepreneurship and running a business and running these projects, you’re going to allow yourself to feel more present in your life, not stuck or distracted. And you’re going to sleep more soundly and work with more focus when you’re working without the worries constantly looping in your brain.
The impact of what we’ve covered today will have a huge impact on your ability to be an effective business owner, project leader, and will no doubt have a ripple effect into your personal life as well. Because let’s face it, life throws us curve balls as well.
Of course, if this is something you’d like support with, I would love to be your coach. You can add your name to the waitlist for private coaching, the website for that is desiid.com/privatecoachingwaitlist. You can also head over to my main site, which is desicreswell.com, click on the coaching tab, which has been completely refreshed and updated and you’ll be able to learn all the nuts and bolts of one-on-one coaching, how I approach business coaching specifically for interior designers, and then add your name to the waitlist from there so you’re the first to know when spots become available.
Before we wrap up, a quick reminder that when you leave a rating and review for the podcast and send me a quick screenshot, either Instagram or at desiid.com, you’ll be entered to win a private coaching session with me. We can even work on this exact topic. The giveaway is ending next Wednesday, November 6th, so get your review in now if you want to be entered.
And lastly, I’ll just say, I loved getting this question on Instagram. It was such a fun topic to dive into. And I have no doubt that you might have a question brewing yourself. So if you want to submit your very own question, just send me a message, @desicreswell is my Instagram handle. And if it seems like something that would be applicable to lots of designers, which I’m guessing it will be, then I will create an episode for you.
All right, that’s what I’ve got for today. I’ll be back next week with a brand new episode. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week.
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