Aug 23, 2017
“Sometimes nothing is the hardest thing to do” (Tyrion Lannister)
*GOT S7 E6 Spoilers ahead*
A quick apology that I missed last week, no excuses but here we are again, how could I miss this week’s episode? But, here we are. GOT S7 E6! This was one of those typical season 6 episodes in that it moved ridiculously quickly, there was little time for character development and we learned that Gendry could take over from Mo Farah on the track. I could pick holes in this episode for days, we already have at work, but we are here to learn so let’s look at some of Tyrion’s wise words: “Sometimes doing nothing is the hardest thing…….”
Anyone who knows me will agree, doing nothing is one of my favourite things and it helps me with my mental health. I’ll explain further on what I mean by that below but I can honestly say, training myself to not only do nothing but detach myself from stressful situations has helped me no end.
So, what was the context that Tyrion said this?
GOT S7 E6 we see Dany has started to become more impulsive, especially according to Tyrion. We could all see that Dany was going to use the retort she did in that it wasn’t impulsive but calculated and planned. Tyrion, for all his faults, seems to be one of the last people in Westeros who is truly trying to build a better world, burning people alive doesn’t really fit in with that vision!
How about some real-life work examples of when doing nothing worked and also when doing something didn’t work?
This was a fun topic to ask around the office, I asked people to give me an example of when you should have done nothing but you didn’t. This is what we came up with:
- Went on the attack after assuming the tone of an email from a client, only to find that I’d misread the situation and I should have just done nothing and waited until I had calmed down
- Worried and stressed so much about a meeting I had that I didn’t sleep the night before (the meeting went amazingly) – I’ll talk more about this later
- Drank too much and started ranting to the boss…….probably shouldn’t have done that
- Sent a strongly worded email to a candidate who had disappeared before finding out why
Now when you did nothing and it worked:
- Didn’t tell a candidate an offer wasn’t going to go in and waited a day to see if it rectified itself…….it did
- Took a step back from a heated situation with a client, slept on it and then went with a measured response the next day, everybody won
- Didn’t get mad at a colleague making a genuine mistake that affected me, our relationship grew stronger from there
- Told myself not to worry about a really brutal meeting coming up tomorrow, or at least what my brain had told me was going to be brutal, turned out it wasn’t!
So how can we link back to GOT S7 E6? Dany did something, she lost a dragon (big win for my predictions below) and maybe she should have done nothing. But then Jon and the coolest gang in the world right now would all have died I hear everyone screaming. Here is the point. No one said doing nothing was easy, in fact “sometimes doing nothing is often the hardest thing to do.”
Let’s loop around now to finish on how this can help your mental health. Time to toot my own trumpet I reckon. There are not many things I consider myself to be really good at in life but dealing with stress and more so not worrying about things before they happen is a big life skill I have strived to implement into my life. I wouldn’t be one of those horizontal people that appear to care about nothing. However what I am talking about here is the ability to go to bed the night, before that meeting or call you don’t want to make, and having a proper rest, or perhaps it is a family gathering or whether the bank is going to approve your mortgage. There are so many things in our life that cause stress and we all need to get better at this.
So how do I deal with it? I do nothing, I tell myself that literally nothing I do right now is going to affect the outcome and I chill. It’s so easy to run through every eventuality in your head until you go numb and start going to ridiculous lengths; what if a meteorite hits; what if I pretend to faint in the meeting maybe that will work etc. etc. It is hard though, it took me a long time, like a muscle it needs training. I went from worrying about things for 30 minutes to 25 to 20 and on and on until this weekend. I had the Sunday night fear in my belly. There was a conversation I didn’t want to have but I knew I was going to have to. The feeling grew and I batted it away, had a word with myself and said whatever I do now is not going to change having to make that call and then I did nothing. Guess what, I went in the next day, had a chat with my client which changed everything and I didn’t have to make the call! Worrying about it would have given me a terrible night’s sleep and maybe ruined the week, doing nothing was definitely the right thing to do.
Update on Joel’s season 7 predictions after watching GOT S7 E6:
1) There has to be an Ice dragon at some point! – BOOM, high fives all round. Now it’s on!
2) Jorah will kill Dany – no news this week, getting worried this is a season 8
3) Bran has allowed the white walkers to follow him through the wall – hmmm maybe off track here
4) Jon and Dany become the power couple of Westeros – did anyone else finally realise they are related when she mentioned her brother after Jon called her Dany. I am going off this relationship now
5) Jamie kills Cersei – would someone just do this already? Get rid of the boring Sansa-Arya biff and send her to kill Cersei (at least my fiancée will stop saying it if it finally happens)
Thanks for keeping up with my posts and I hoped you enjoyed my GOT S7 E6 takeaways.
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