Five Simple Ways to Regain Control When the Day Starts Going Wrong
Every practice manager knows the kind of day.
The first clinic is already running fifteen minutes late. A patient at reception wants to complain. Someone has phoned in sick. The lab has delayed an order that was promised for today, and just as you start dealing with one problem, the phone rings again.
Nothing is necessarily a disaster on its own. The problem is that everything seems to happen at once.
These are the moments when leadership becomes visible.
It is easy to be calm, positive and organised when the diary is running perfectly and the team is fully staffed. The real test comes when pressure builds and everybody starts looking towards the manager for direction.
Over the years, working with optical practices and speaking with practice managers across the industry, I have noticed that the strongest managers are not necessarily people who never feel stressed.
They absolutely do.
What they tend to be better at is recognising when stress is beginning to influence their behaviour and finding a way to reset before responding.
That matters because a manager’s mood travels surprisingly quickly through a practice. If the manager becomes visibly frustrated, starts rushing or snaps at somebody, the tension spreads. Reception becomes more anxious. Communication gets shorter. Small mistakes become more likely.
But when the person leading the practice remains measured, something else happens.
The team begins to believe the situation is manageable.
That is emotional leadership.
Here are five simple techniques that can help when one of those days arrives.
1. Give Yourself 60 Seconds Before You React
When several things go wrong at once, there is an understandable temptation to start fixing everything immediately.
Sometimes the better decision is to give yourself a minute.
Step into the office, dispensing room or somewhere quiet if circumstances allow. Slow your breathing and give your mind a chance to catch up with what is happening.
You might try breathing in gently for four seconds, pausing briefly, and then breathing out slowly. Repeat it several times.
The purpose is not to magically remove the problems waiting outside the door.
They will still be there in sixty seconds.
What you are changing is the state in which you return to them.
That short pause can be the difference between reacting emotionally and asking the practical questions that actually matter.
What needs dealing with first?
What can wait?
Who can help?
What does the patient need to hear?
What can I delegate?
A minute spent regaining perspective can save considerably more time spent repairing a rushed decision.
2. Break the Mental Loop
Stress has a habit of repeating itself in our heads.
The clinic is late.
The patient is getting annoyed.
We’re short staffed.
We’re never going to catch up.
Before long, you are no longer dealing only with what is actually happening. You are also dealing with the increasingly negative story your mind is creating about what might happen next.
This is where a simple pattern interrupt can be useful.
Physically move away from where you are for a moment. Walk to another part of the practice. Roll your shoulders. Get a glass of water. Take a few deliberate steps before returning to the problem.
It sounds almost too simple to be useful, but sometimes changing what you are physically doing is enough to interrupt the repetitive thought pattern.
The important part is what comes next.
Replace “Everything is going wrong” with something more specific.
“We are twenty minutes behind. What can we change?”
That is a problem you can work with.
Great managers are often very good at turning emotional situations back into practical ones.
3. Bring Yourself Back to What Is Actually Happening
When pressure becomes intense, our minds can race several steps ahead of reality.
A patient complaint becomes “We’re going to lose them.”
A delayed clinic becomes “The whole afternoon is ruined.”
A staff absence becomes “How are we possibly going to manage today?”
One technique sometimes used to bring attention back to the present is the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise.
Notice five things you can see, four things you can physically feel or touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste or otherwise consciously notice.
You obviously do not need to announce that you are doing this in the middle of the practice.
It can be done quietly.
The value is in moving your attention away from everything your mind is predicting and back towards what is actually happening around you.
Once you are back in the present, ask yourself:
What is the next useful thing I can do?
Not how you are going to rescue the entire day.
Just the next useful thing.
Perhaps it is speaking to the waiting patient.
Perhaps it is rearranging one appointment.
Perhaps it is asking somebody to cover reception for ten minutes.
Leadership under pressure often becomes easier when you stop trying to solve the whole afternoon in your head.
4. Use a Simple Physical Reset
Sometimes you can feel stress physically before you have even processed what is happening mentally.
Your shoulders tighten. Your breathing changes. You start moving faster. Your patience becomes shorter.
A small physical reset can help interrupt that escalation.
For some people, something as straightforward as washing their hands with cool water, holding a cool drink or stepping somewhere quieter for a moment helps them refocus.
Again, this is not about pretending that a glass of cold water will solve a staffing problem.
It won’t.
The point is creating a deliberate interruption between the stressful event and your response to it.
Think of it as a small circuit breaker.
Instead of moving immediately from problem → emotion → reaction, you create another step:
problem → pause → response.
That small gap is where a lot of good leadership happens.
5. Remember That the First Emotion Does Not Need to Become the Final Response
There is a popular idea often referred to as the “90-second rule”, associated with neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor: the initial physiological response to an emotional trigger can be relatively brief, while continued thinking about the event can prolong our emotional experience.
The precise experience is obviously more complicated than setting a stopwatch for ninety seconds. You should not expect frustration or stress to disappear automatically after a minute and a half.
But there is a genuinely useful leadership principle underneath the idea.
You do not have to act on the first emotion you feel.
A patient may speak to you unfairly and your immediate reaction might be irritation.
A colleague may make a mistake at exactly the wrong moment and you might feel angry.
A supplier may let you down for the third time and you might want to pick up the phone and unload your frustration.
Feeling that emotion is human.
Leadership is deciding what happens next.
Give the initial reaction somewhere to go before you make the decision, send the email or have the conversation.
You can be frustrated and still respond professionally.
You can be under pressure and still speak respectfully.
You can have a difficult day without passing that difficult day on to everybody around you.
That is a skill, and like most skills, it improves with practice.
Your Team Is Watching More Than You Realise
One of the interesting things about managing an optical practice is that people take cues from you constantly.
Imagine the clinic is thirty minutes behind.
If the manager starts pacing around saying, “This is an absolute nightmare,” the team receives a message: we are losing control.
If the manager instead says, “We’re thirty minutes behind. Let’s look at the next three patients and work out what we can realistically adjust,” the team receives a completely different message.
The underlying problem has not changed.
The leadership has.
That does not mean managers should hide every emotion or walk around pretending everything is wonderful. Teams can spot false positivity very quickly.
Calm leadership is not pretending there is no problem.
It is showing people that the problem can be handled.
Calm Does Not Mean Carrying Everything Yourself
There is another side to this that is important.
Being the calm manager should not mean becoming the person who absorbs every problem in the practice.
That eventually creates another problem: an exhausted manager.
Strong leadership also means knowing when to delegate, when to ask the team for support and when expectations need to change.
If the practice is short staffed, something may need deprioritising.
If clinics are consistently overrunning, the diary may need examining.
If patient complaints repeatedly arise around the same issue, the process may need changing.
Stress-management techniques are useful for difficult moments, but they should never become a way of tolerating problems that require a proper operational solution.
Sometimes the best response to pressure is not learning to tolerate more of it.
It is fixing whatever keeps creating it.
The Real Skill Is Responding Rather Than Reacting
Every optical practice has difficult days.
Patients arrive late. Clinics overrun. Orders go missing. Equipment develops problems. Team members call in sick. Occasionally, several of those things happen before lunch.
You cannot control all of that.
What you can influence is what happens when it lands on your desk.
The strongest practice managers I have encountered are not permanently calm human beings who never become frustrated. They simply become better at noticing their reaction before allowing it to determine their behaviour.
They pause.
They establish the facts.
They decide what matters first.
They communicate clearly.
Then they move the team forward.
Because when the manager appears steady, the team feels safer. When the team feels safer, they think more clearly. And when everybody is thinking clearly, the practice has a much better chance of turning a difficult day around.
Sometimes great leadership really does begin with something as simple as a pause.
