You’re having one of those mornings. The children are taking eons to complete the simplest of tasks, your email is pinging with news of crisis upon crisis developing at work, and your first meeting of the day has been moved forward half an hour so you’re already late. As you hastily grab your bag to leave, you send a cereal box flying, and its entire contents skimming across the floor… you’re about to blow….
What do you do next?
I’d like to talk to you about what happens when life isn’t going according to plan – when things aren’t the way that you intended them to be. It might be a simple as running late, or something bigger – a piece of bad news, perhaps your plans have been badly thwarted, or the rug has been pulled from under you. What happens then?
I’m not necessarily thinking about what you’re doing, but how you’re being – who it is that you choose to be, because you truly have a choice. You can choose to say ‘ok this has happened, it’s not what I would have chosen, but I’m going to be courageous, I’m going to be calm, dignified, and I’m going to focus on finding a solution.’
Make your choice
We need to make a conscious choice at times of strife because otherwise we risk flipping back into what I call trigger behaviours and habits – under which, of course, sit certain beliefs. Those beliefs might be something like ‘this always happens to me’, or ‘it’s not fair’, or perhaps ‘I don’t deserve this’. You could end up feeling like a victim; feeling angry, bitter and resentful.
That’s not to say you should deny these feelings – if they are coming up they are important and need to be examined rather than repressed, but you do have a choice in how you view a situation and in who you want to be.
What I can tell you from past experience is that choosing the victim route is no way to happiness.
So next time the cereal hits the floor, so to speak, will you rage, or go with it? Curse it, or calmly crunch your way through? Remember, you have a choice… so who do you want to be?