Maybe it is turning into one those weeks after all. You may have read about the flood that I was greeted with on my return to my apartment a couple of days ago. It is still a right old mess and starting to make everything else smell a bit damp and mouldy. Not too nice to live in. But I am staying positive about the situation and just trying to get on with things despite being now cooped up in one room.

So just when I was getting used to a slightly different way of doing things at home and thinking that I was still able to do what I need to do work-wise on a daily basis, I somehow managed to delete the homepage of this blog by messing about with my ftp program. Now I am not the most tech-savvy person around but usually, if I do something on my computer that I really didn’t mean to, and it causes what on the face of it looks like a distaster that will ruin days or weeks of work, with a bit of thought and a calm approach I can put it right again.

Well if you are reading this I must have been able to do it this time as well. But, I have to be honest, that at the time it looked like I had really managed to screw myself. I stared at the screen of my ftp client long and hard but nothing popped into my head as regards how the hell I was going to reverse what I had done. And just a little, I started to panic that I had lost weeks and weeks of hard work. I realised that if there was any chance of getting the blog back to its original and fine-looking self I was going to need help.

Now, the guys at the help desk of my web hosting are very quick in their response to support queries so with quiet confidence I sat back and awaited a reply to my problem. Time passed. And a bit more. Still no response. This was unusual, so I started to think about the consequences of the lost/wasted time this was costing. I began running through all the work I had planned to do that day but now couldn’t. And I started to feel a general air of gloom descend on a day that I originally thought was going to be productive and positive.

What had happened was that a perceived calamity which in all truth I made out in my mind to be far worse and of greater magnitude that it really was in all probability had turned my initial positive mental attitude into a negative one. My thoughts had been positive to start with, but had been eroded and replaced with negative ones. This can happen to us all too easily if we let it.

But there are ways to limit this kind of mental slide from positive to negative. There are techniques we can learn to mentally take a stepback from whatever life throws up to try and ruin our day. It may take some practice (looks like I need more!) but it can be done.

What did I do? Well I wrote this blog post of course-in notepad! I took a few moments to guage my reaction to this set-back, and then tried to practice what I preach and look for positives in seemingly negative scenarios. A bit of self anaysis and talk can be a good thing, as it allows you to put things into perspective more logically, gives you a chance to weigh up your options and then proceed with the best plan of action.