Bad days: how to handle them and not give up

Bad days don't mean something is wrong with you. They mean you're human.

In this listener Q&A episode, Vira brings Olivier a question we've all lived through "how do you handle the days when you want to give up, question everything, and wonder why you even started?"

Olivier's answer might surprise you. Instead of offering a productivity hack or a motivational pep talk, he invites us to stop calling them bad days altogether.

Drawing on the rhythms of nature — seasons, night and day, light and dark — he makes the case that our darker, slower days aren't obstacles to good work. They're actually where creativity is born, where the real questions surface, and where we quietly gather everything we need for the brighter days ahead.

A short but deeply grounding episode for anyone who has ever felt guilty for not being "on" and needed a reminder that rest, doubt, and stillness are not the enemy of meaningful work. They are part of it.

"It's not a bad day. It's a dark day. And darkness has always been where the best things grow." 

Follow on Linkedin: Olivier Egli 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm your host, Olivier, and this is the Do Happy Work podcast where we look at work in a different, more natural, and more peaceful way.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of Do Happy Work. This is Vera. I'm back with listener questions. Things that folks want to know, and Olivier can give guidance on. This is a big question. I think it's a question that impacts all of us, but um I felt it was really important to tackle. The question is, how do we deal with the bad days?

SPEAKER_01 0:34

With the bad days.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

And that goes on. The bad days when I ask, why am I even doing this? Why did I start it? I just want to give up.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

When when uh when the walls come crashing in.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Yeah, we've all been there.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

The darkness comes and rolls over us. There's this belief that, you know, once you hit a certain threshold, you will only have good days and it will only be sunshine. For the longest time I thought, you know, there's something wrong with me for having these bad days. Or rather, like, why do I still have them? And have I not outgrown the sluggish days?

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Ah, that's a good point. Like, wait, I do all this stuff, I'm actually happy. Why are they so bad?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah, I moved out of the corporate structure and I I had all this introspection. I started to study uh the way nature grows, the way management can be aligned with nature, but that doesn't mean that suddenly I um I snapped out of these cyclical relationships with light and dark. On the contrary, I think they became even more prevalent and more pronounced because now I was not distracted, I was actually really, really paying attention to what was going on with me. So I noticed even more than before, oh, this is a dark day. This is a day where doubt, you know, is high and trust is low, where uh movement is impeded. But I had a problem with it because I thought like, oh no, I'm not performing, I'm uh something is wrong, I'm not doing the right thing. But see, the problem is that at first I judged it, right? I judged it, and I still do every now and then, you know, I wake up and I realize, oh no, right.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

This is gonna be one of those days.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

And and of course, I have the I have the the freedom that because I work for myself, I am flexible in my time, I can then choose how to go about it. But the thing that really made a difference was when I shed the belief that every day has to be sunshine, right? Because at first there is this judgment, this idea in in a society that we once things line up, once things work out, everything will be, you know, sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. Who taught us that? Yeah, who in their right mind has the right to teach us and tell us and make us believe that that's what life is about because we all know. No, life is actually made up of these contrasting things we call light and darkness, or uh night and day, or summer and winter, and then you have you know those gradients in between, spring and which are so important. When I worked in corporate structures, I thought about life in a linear way. I thought about I go from A to Z, A being you know the beginning of a project, Z is the end of the project, or morning to evening, you know, but that's wrong. We have to actually look at life in as circles where everything repeats itself, and we have to manage these circles, we have to give in to these circles. What is a circle else than just polar opposites that keep swinging back and forth like a pendulum, right? You swing and swing and so you spin. And the spinning happens between those contrasting moments where you're full of lost and intention and faith and trust, and and then the days where all of this is just suddenly gone. It's just flushed away. But what remains? That is the question. Because when when you don't know, when you just give into uh the the modus of the world, or we'll call it a dark day. If you don't have this underlying certainty that you know you're worthy of showing up and that the light will come back and the darkness is essential, if you don't have that, your brain thinks it's now gonna be dark forever. And that is a problem that people have that ask this question out of fear. They're like, something is wrong with me. At some point, it's all gonna be darkness. But nature teaches us the night is the darkest just before sunrise, right? And that's exactly true. When we are in such dark moments, we have to understand that they are essential and we have to use them. Make your job fit for this truth.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

When you say to make your job, you're saying your work on that day should fit how you feel that day.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

And I think you have leeway as a business owner, but even as an employee, you could do that.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Yeah, yeah. We're talking about flexibility in the job, in the workplace. That is the flexibility. We cannot always be creative and we cannot always be productive. As a matter of fact, I actually do think that on the lighter days, that's when we are highly productive. And on the darker days, it's when our muse shows. And I have seen this happen in myself. It's like when I'm sluggish, when the darkness hits, it's usually when something opens up in us and channels ideas, channels creativity, originality. But on these so-called brighter days, we call them brighter days because we're so go, go, go, go, right? We're like busy bodies and we feel like we're on top of the world. What we actually are is we're aligned with our productive self. We can now do the things that we channeled in darkness. And that's exactly how nature works too. You know, the respite uh that brings winter when everything is in a slumber. We think falsely that everything is dying. Or we think that the tree is just sleeping, nothing is happening. It's not true. It's not true. Nothing ever stands still, right? The circle. Everything is still very much present, but in introspection. That's what we do when we're when we are asleep. At night, you're not dead. You you go places and you channel things, and these things are stored in you, but then when you are in daylight and you feel, you know, go, go, go, you can now channel those. But sometimes there is a day where you're still in that mode. You are still in need of introspection, of gentle caresses, of taking things slowly, and maybe just drawing things up or sitting in silence. The problem is just that we're so impatient in these moments that rather than sitting in it and seeing the validity, we think something is wrong because we compare it to the lighter days.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

And seeing the beautiful opportunity in it, like you a light bulb went off just now when you said that I that creativity can flow from those dark days. And I I thought to for myself, I'm like when I feel really down or dark like that, I do ask those introspective questions. What am I doing? What is it that I'm feeling? What do I want? What do I need? Like, that's when you really do ask those questions.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

I do not ask them in um in broad daylight because you're too in it.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

I'm too in it. I'm too like, I don't know, the endorphins, the energy, everything's going, going, going, which it's true. Like on those days, I find that for me, if I go for a walk, my creative juices really do get going. Some people might just be have to sit in silence or just take a nap.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Before you judge a day as bad, and again, I do not like this idea, the duality of good and bad, that's a value judgment that already destroys your day before it has begun. But you are very well okay to welcome the day as a dark day and say, like, oh, hello darkness, my old friend, right? And you say, like, what kind of darkness are you today? Because it's not a loss of faith and a loss of trust. It is just something that needs to be seen. And sometimes for me, I realize, oh, I need to be patient. I'm I'm not patient. And so now this day forces me to slow down, to look what is happening. What is it actually, rather than just you know, constantly running on autopilot, it forces me. And I guarantee you, if you zoom out and you step out of the judgment of like, oh, it's a bad day or a good day, you suddenly start to realize the value of such days. Yeah. And you start to embrace loss, pain, uncertainty, all these things that we falsely attribute with something bad, you start to realize that they are very important. But Western culture is not good at that. Western culture wants to amass, it wants to have, it wants to do, it wants to be busy. It's the Eastern culture that is much more rooted in the principle of slowness, of steadiness, of incremental slow pace, of continuously evolving slowly through the motions, the ups and downs.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

And approaching things without judgment, too.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Well, it's judgment that turns a dark day into a bad day. And that's not fair.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Because think about how many bad days are you going to have just because of judgment. You're not getting those back. I remember that when I was much younger, my parents asked me if I wanted a puppy. And because I learned that dogs die, I didn't want one. So I told my mom, no, I don't want a puppy that's gonna die. And it's a certainty, right? And the problem with that is that if we live our life that way, we're afraid of the dark days, we're afraid of when the puppy's gonna die. Well, we're not gonna have the experience of companionship of the dog that might last 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 years just because of that one day and a few days of pain afterwards that are necessary.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

And all the memories that come with it, you take yourself out of life.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Yes, literally. Yeah, you yeah, you remove a good chunk of life, a good chunk of possibility of sitting in life, channeling from life, experiencing life. When people say that they are having a bad day, they have removed that day from their life. They have removed it.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Does that sound really scary? No, it's not day anymore. Yeah, you're right.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

So at the end of the year, how many days have you removed?

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Yeah. I don't want to ignore or just give away a day of my life just because I dubbed it bad instead of using it.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Well, a little child would never do that. No. They don't know about bad days. They they're just in the moment.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

We teach them. Well, you're having a bad day today. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Well, yeah, exactly. It's in our uh use of words, but it's then we teach our kids to dissociate good from bad, bright from dark, right? That which is dark is bad and must be avoided. Death is bad. I think actually the degree to which a culture is free can be seen in how they view death. And a bad day has for the brain uh the same meaning as death. It's the same thing because you bathe in uncertainty. It's the loss of the script, you lose the threads. Just like the way we see death. But if you're able to actually embrace death, not just as inevitable, but as part of life, as life itself. Not as something that means the absence of life, but it means that you have lived. If you are able to die, it means you're able to live. What when you're able to see it that way, uncertainty actually becomes life. It becomes important. It's important not to know. Because when are we the most curious? When are we the most um experimental? When are we the most creative in our things? It's when we don't know.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Yeah, it's very true.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

When you feel like I know everything, I can do everything, that's when you're not creative. That's when you're productive, that's when you do things, you get shit done. But creativity requires darkness. And I think that the history of mankind has shown time and time again how dark characters appear so creative to us, uh, dark and stormy. And that has nothing to do with their psyche being broken. It's just that they sit a lot in darkness.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Yeah, they do. And there's a lot of silence, a lot of darkness. That's true. Yeah. And I think instead of thinking of it as um in a way of judgment, if you don't like the light and dark, just think you need the contrast to recognize the other side of things, right? It's two sides to every coin.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

It's the yin and the yin.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah. So it's just contrast. Think of it that way. And I think it will help you step into your darker day in a gentler manner. Yeah. Instead of being so harsh on yourself, hopefully. But hey, if you want to dig a little deeper into being unconditional in your approach to your day to your life, I highly recommend you go check out my father-in-law's book, The Lola Principle. You can get it at thelola principle.com or on Amazon. So check it out. Again, The Lola Principle by Rene Eggley, my father in law. It's a great book. It's a super fast read that you can sit with and come back to again and again. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll catch you on the next one.