I completely stuffed up this morning. I was already at my favourite coffee shop, sneaking in a before work date with my partner and intending to stay on afterwards and complete my Lead With Joy week task for the day.

When my partner left and I pulled out my notebook to start journaling, and then turned to my emails to check my task I realised I had completely stuffed up.

You see each day this week I’m sending out special emails as part of my free online community event called Lead With Joy. The idea is that you create a “container for joy” each day by asking yourself a question at the start and at the end of each day.

In each email there’s also a special template you can download for your day (with a special mantra to keep you feeling good all day).

Except that today, Day 2, I’d sent out the completely wrong email. So I’d trundled off to my coffee shop all excited to complete my joy task, only to realise the email was all wrong!

Now the panic was knocking at my door (the one inside my head).

It was starting to tell me how ridiculous I am to be running an event that requires people to do something first thing in the morning and I haven’t even sent it to them! How *stupid* I was for not even being able to make it past Day 2 of a five day event without making a mega stuff up. And, that perhaps I *should* stop getting distracted with silly things like coffee and pre-work dates and get back to work and actually do my job.

Uh-oh.

That’s exactly where I was headed, when…

Day 1’s mantra popped into my head. Just like that. “Take a deep breath and let it all go”.

So, I did.

And you know what? It really did all go away.

That knocking at the door that was so incessant just moments ago, had melted away. And instead it was replaced with a smile. Strange, but true.

Within moments of recalling the mantra from Day 1 I had managed to recircuit all that stress, busyness, and beating-up-myself-ness to feeling good.

I chose to allow the mistake. I chose to acknowledge it and the feeling that had bubbled up inside of me. And then, I chose to feel good about it.

It’s okay. This is fixable.

People will understand. I’m human. I make mistakes.

And, as I’ve been teaching, there really isn’t a “right” or “wrong” way to move through the Lead With Joy tasks, so it also actually doesn’t matter so much if they receive their email a few hours late from me.

Much more gentle.

It felt so much better. An instant relief.

And, it meant I got to deliver that email (the real one) in a much better state of mind. I got to email everyone feeling good and I just know that will have rubbed off a little in their inboxes.

So, here’s the key for you today, if you’re feeling a little caught up in the busyness and feeling the overwhelm start to seep in, “Take a deep breath and let it all go”.

You’ve got this. You deserve to feel good.