How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

SEVENTEEN
Keeping a Cool Head
As a young man, Bartek knew he wanted to work with food. But when he first
arrived in London from Poland, he had to take the first job that came along:
mopping floors in a hotel where he remembers “corridors so long you could see
the curvature of the earth.” His breakthrough came when he managed to
persuade the hotel chef to let him try out for a job in the restaurant kitchen—and
from that point, he built a flourishing career in the catering industry, eventually
becoming a senior manager in a successful company making soup and stews.
Bartek ran their day-to-day operations while helping the owners expand the
business. But in 2012, disaster struck. He had decided the company should
expand production capacity to meet an expected surge in demand from visitors
flooding into London for the 2012 Olympics. But that wasn’t how it turned out.
“Everyone had forecast that the Olympics was going to be amazing for
businesses in London. Orders would be hard to fill because of the demand, and
hard to deliver because the roads would be jammed with visitors. I devoted a lot
of time to making sure that we were on top of it. We hired more drivers and
leased more vans. We were so ready,” Bartek says. “I thought we’d not just
protect our existing business, but also pick up new business from restaurants
whose suppliers hadn’t planned as well as we had. Then the first day of the
Olympics arrived. We all left home early to get to work on time, thinking that
traffic would be terrible—but the roads were completely clear. Our fleet of
delivery trucks completed their rounds and were back at the depot within three
hours.”
It was the first of a series of terrible days. Instead of booming, orders were
down, and the business was losing money. “It was really tough. And personally,
it felt like people were questioning everything I did.” Bartek felt so bad about
the situation that he was finding it hard to think straight. He could feel his
muscles tightening up, which he realized was a sign his brain was on the
defensive—something he was well equipped to recognize, thanks to his martial
arts training. He knew he needed to find a way to manage his reaction, to chill
out enough to bring his brain’s deliberate system back online so he could figure

---

out the right way forward. Luckily, Bartek knew just how to do that (which
means I can reassure you that his story has a happy ending). Let me explain the
kind of tactics he used.