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Don't Let It Get To You

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: How can you build your resilience, so that life's little upsets don't become big and gloomy, and so that you don't "waste" emotional time? Here are some ideas you can try, all of which have helped my coaching clients from time to time. The governing principle is that you want to strive to be more of a take-charge "Entrepreneur" type, who takes personal responsibility for keeping a positive attitude, and less of a "Victim" type, who drifts along and allows life to just "happen to him."

Don't Let It Get To You

Protect Your Inspiration Against Things That Might Upset You Last Saturday, Friend Wife and I were motoring around Colorado enjoying our weekend, and we were listening to a good college football game on the radio between stops. The game was between two teams we really like, but one of the competitors was a team of which I've been a fan since I was old enough to watch football. My team was heavily favored, but the other team unexpectedly gave them a great game and lost by only three points.

Meanwhile, Granny (who's probably reading this - Hi Granny!) was tuned in to the game, too, since my team is also very-much her team. However, as I understand it, she heard the announcers praising the other team so much that, late in the game, she assumed our team had been upset, and turned the game off a couple minutes before the final gun. She emailed me later (yes, at 93, she's as good at email as anybody) and told me she had spent a couple days being very upset herself about the unexpected early-season loss... only to be "set straight" by my uncle. Turns out her team won!

I remember thinking, hmm, Granny had to spend at least a couple days feeling bummed-out about that... for no reason. I worry that at her advanced stage of maturity and wisdom, it isn't good for her to be upset about anything, and certainly not for days.

And emotionally, she can't get that "time" back.

Suppose it'd been the other way around. Suppose she thinks her team won, so she gets to be relatively happy (or at least not unhappy) for a couple days... then later finds out they'd actually lost. She would be upset later... but would she be less upset? More? Is it just a case of delaying the disappointment?

I don't know... and I guess disappointment is inevitable from time to time.

The lesson is that your personal inspiration depends upon your attitude, and that depends to a large degree on your resilience to disappointments. Whatever time you spend being upset about something, that time is lost in your continual development of a happy, upbeat outlook. And you can't get it back.

How can you build your resilience, so that life's little upsets don't become big and gloomy, and so that you don't "waste" emotional time? Here are some ideas you can try, all of which have helped my coaching clients from time to time. The governing principle is that you want to strive to be more of a take-charge "Entrepreneur" type, who takes personal responsibility for keeping a positive attitude, and less of a "Victim" type, who drifts along and allows life to just "happen to him."

First, learn that life's a "numbers game." For every disappointment, you get a certain number of nice surprises (though I've noticed Entrepreneurs tend to enjoy a better ratio than do Victims). Professional sellers know this. They understand that every "no" from a customer moves them closer to the inevitable "yes." So embrace the notion that every disappointment is moving you statistically closer to a pleasant surprise! And for those of you who think this is just self-induced emotional manipulation, congratulations, you're right. But if you don't do it, you'll allow your emotions to manipulate you. If you see every disappointment as yet more evidence that you're doomed to a life of mediocrity or failure, over time, that will be true. If you think about it, isn't that also emotional manipulation? Given a choice, I'll manage my emotions with a view toward building my positive outlook.

That brings up another idea you can use to build emotional resilience: action. For the fans of the team that lost Saturday's game, the best action is probably to refuse to dwell on the defeat, and instead to talk about how close the team came to a major upset of a highly-ranked team... and then to look with renewed optimism toward next week's opponent! Of course, the football players themselves already know this. They know that the best way to pull themselves up emotionally after a tough loss is to get out on the practice field and work on their game. This is one of the best insights you can gain to build reslience: if the ailment is worry, the prescription is always action. I heard a sales manager once say that "worry is negative goal setting," and he's right. When you sit around and worry, what you're doing is imagining a bad future, and your inaction is helping to bring it about. Traditional goal-setting, on the other hand, requires you to imagine a good future - and then to take action to bring that future about.

Finally, realize that no matter how disappointing the current setback is, it's not the end of the world. Here, having a good (and balanced) memory will serve you well. In goal setting, you use your imagination to help you see a positive future; it also helps to remember past disappointments and how they turned out not to be nearly as catastrophic as you thought, at the time, they would be. Remember the year your team dropped a key game early in the season? You thought the season was lost. Then they came back and won all their other games, saw their rivals also stumble at some point during the long course of the season, and ended up winning the championship!

If you learn to use your memory, your imagination, and your rational understanding of probabilities... you can, over time, build your resilience and improve your outlook on life. My 93-year-old grandmother is pretty good at this, and has taught me more than a thing or two about resilience over the years. She's certainly an inspiration, but not because she made it to 93 with all her marbles. Granny is inspiring because she is, herself, inspired; she has more pleasant surprises than disappointments because she takes responsibility for her own attitude; and she's not often upset because she's built her resilience.

Thanks for the lesson!

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Article Tags: health wealth and happiness, inspirational leadership, personal responsibility, successful entrepreneurs



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