Healthy Detachments

What do you do to make yourself fall asleep? Drink a cup of herbal tea? a glass of Riesling? Count sheep? I used to try reading my textbook whenever my vicious insomnia strikes. Only a couple paragraphs then my eyelids would be as heavy as lead. Well, me having a problem to hit the hay is not exactly news. But I caught myself enjoying the persistent but painful moment of reminiscing what has happened during my newscast lately. I replay a slideshow of mistakes over and over again. The slideshow even has no parameter of autoplay equals false. Too many shoulda woulda coulda flashing before my mind's eye.

One of my great mentors, Mariel Myers, an Emmy-winning KPIX -TV/CBS 5 producer in San Francisco, Bay Area, read my mind verbatim.

She said, "As you produce more and more shows, you'll make less mistakes; you'll realize there are times when there's nothing you could have done; you'll find ways to save a show when it goes off course; and you'll realize every day is a second chance to get it right."

So the trick is to let go once the show is over. A little bit of reformatting to the brain that there's always tomorrow.

She told me, "the old producing motto is... "you're only as good as your last show."

Once I screw up, I should even be more motivated to do 10x better the next day.

I figured that I should be able to master this let-go skill over time. I mean, if the frequency of me butchering the show is quite high, I should be developing some kind of immune system to the heartache sometime soon, right? Not that I'm saying that my show is normally a trainwreck..

So..Dear Ebay, I have some textbooks to sell.