'Control the controllable'

The year 2020 didn’t pan out the way Mullingar motivational speaker and goal setting coach Gerry Duffy had envisaged, but he survived, and in many ways thrived by “controlling the controllable”.

One of the most in-demand figures in his field, with a long list of clients across the corporate world, Gerry knew that when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in Europe early last year, many of the events he had been booked to speak at would not be going ahead in their original in-person format.

Rather than panic or fret about the uncertainty brought about by the worst public health crisis to hit the world in a century, he focused on identifying what he would need to do to move his business online.

Speaking to the Westmeath Examiner last week, Gerry says the strategy he used can be adapted by anyone going through a difficult period at the moment or at any time in their lives.

“It starts by identifying the resources that you need to use and you have at your disposal. The first resource we have, and the most important one, is ourselves and the most important part of ourselves, I’d imagine, is the mind.

“It starts with a realisation that things are they way they are. How you react to them is going to determine what it is going to be like for you.

“If people are worried about school or their job or their business, I often use the analogy of crossing the road. Two people are crossing a busy road, there are cars going by and there are no traffic lights. One person is worried about it and the other is concerned, I often ask in workshops who will get across safely.

“Ninety nine percent of people will say the concerned person is more likely to get across the road and, of course, crossing the road is just a metaphor for getting through a crisis or challenge.

The worried person is thinking about getting knocked down. The concerned person is thinking about how they will get across safely. They are both at the side of the road but their thinking is completely different. They are at completely different spaces in their minds.

“The concerned person goes looking for strategies and gathering information. They may look at their resources. They are planning how they will get across; they are looking at the speed of the cars and the volume of traffic. They are checking if there are traffic lights further up the road and out of it all, they formulate a plan to get across safely.

“They are able to step on the road confidently, based on the quality of their thinking, but when all of this is going on, the worried person is standing there consumed by worry. It is not that they don’t have the ability to get through it. It’s just where they have invested their thinking.

“Bringing it back to resources, for me in my business, when Covid hit, I looked at what I resources I had. I was fortunate that I could work from home, that’s a resource. I had heat, that’s really important. I had WiFi at home, which is really valuable to me. These are some of the resources I was able to access.

“If you are home-schooling look, at the resources you have. Maybe you have a room you can use, you might have WiFi, maybe your child’s teachers will be teaching online; these are all things that can help you get through it.

“Ultimately, it is about investing our thinking into focusing on what we do want rather than what we don’t want.”

Gerry says that he empathises with people who worry excessively because at one point in his life he did so too.

“At one time I was challenged by many of these things but what I learned to do was accept that I can’t control what I can’t control. I can’t control the economy. I can’t control Covid. I can’t control the wider speaking business industry that I am in, but I can control myself.

“I encourage people to write down all of the things that they are in control of and to invest their focus and energy there. I am in control of my mind. I am in control of my time and using it effectively. I am in control of being organised, and different things in my business that can help me get through this time.

“It is about focusing on what you can control. When it comes to students [studying for the Leaving Cert]. They are in control of their time. They know what subjects they are sitting. They can focus on what resources they have available to help them. They can control those things rather than thinking about whether the Leaving Cert is going to happen. They can’t control that. That’s someone else’s role and responsibility. What they can control is making the best use of their time in January to prepare for it. If things change and it doesn’t go ahead, that’s a different thing. If it does, they will be better prepared for it because they have controlled the controllable.

“I can’t control the economy but I can control how I show up for the economy and for my business. I can’t control what announcements they are going to make next week but I just focus on those things that I can control and doing them the best that I can.

“At one time I might have worried about what if nobody books me. What if my clients don’t want to engage online? What if they don’t have the budget?

“Instead, one of the things I did last March and April was look at the things that I did for my clients and I adapted them for an online world immediately. I went back to them and said ‘listen, what were going to do?, I feel we can do it online and this is how we can do it’. Thankfully, they liked what they saw and they were willing to engage with me.”

Gerry was an early adapter of platforms such as Zoom, which he had been using for a couple of years prior to the start of the pandemic. He says that he was fortunate that his comfort with the necessary technology enabled him to move his business online successfully.

He believes that as challenging as the last year has been for many people, some positives will come out of it.

“I think long-term there will be some silver linings out of this, even in terms of meeting up with people in business. I think that people might be less likely to jump in their car and go to Dublin for a meeting. They might say let’s do it on Zoom instead. While none of us wanted Covid, I think long-term, we will do things differently because of it.”

Gerry, who started his own speaking and training business in 2009 after overcoming a crippling fear of public speaking, sprang to national prominence in 2010 when he and fellow Mullingar native Ken Whitelaw ran 32 marathons in 32 days, raising around €500,000 for charity. He followed that up a year later by winning the first DECA Iron Distance Triathlon (10 Ironmans in 10 days) held in the UK.

As exercise has been a major part of his life for more than two decades, it is perhaps unsurprising that he believes that regular physical activity is vital in times like these. Heartened by the massive increase in the number of people running and cycling since the start of the pandemic, he says it doesn’t matter what form of exercise you do, as long as it gets the heart pumping.

“Exercise is different things for different people. For some people it could be dancing to a song for 10 minutes in the morning. For someone else it could be going for a run.

“I don’t necessarily encourage people to take up sport because sport is a personal choice, but the impact of physical exercise on the body, in my opinion, is a game changer for any of us. When I was 27, I took up running and on the very first day I felt better. I ask people [in webinars during the pandemic] if they exercised that morning and whoever puts up their hand I ask them if they felt better – 100 per cent say they did. Who doesn’t want to feel better? Life rewards us when we put in the extra effort, because for many of us exercise is an effort.

“In March, I said to myself that now more than ever, I needed to be exercising because I knew that it would feed into my mind in terms of positivity and energy and motivation and resilience because I always feel better having exercised.

“Thirty minutes of exercise is two percent of your day and yet it impacts in so many different areas of our lives. If people are keen to keep up the exercise when things return to normal, they can’t leave it to chance.

“You have to make a plan for it to become a regular thing in your life. If you make a plan, you are much more likely to actually do it.

“Unless you make a plan, it remains a wish, and a wish doesn’t get us out the door.

“You need a plan of action to get out the door.”