Things aren’t upsetting. Circumstances just are what they are.
It is our feelings that we attach to these things. Our judgments of good and bad regarding those things, that is what upset us. Remove the judgement, the expectations, the feelings about things that happen in your life. This is what causes stress, gives fuel to anger, and gets in the way of making good decisions in life.
While there is no objective truth. We can practice some objectivity in our daily lives. Objectivity takes changing our perspective. Viewing what is going on without the emotional quality that comes by allowing words to trigger us, whether those words are spoken by someone around us or in our own minds. Our words and emotions provide the color that makes us feel that something is bad. We first have to Stop.
Stop our thinking in its tracks. Pause and relax. Don’t think. Let your emotions begin to recenter. Get out of your head. Think about the here and now.
Not what might happen, could happen, your afraid will happen. Not how you feel about what happened. Try stating what happened as a fact. Practice this, and you’ll see how much of what you state as a fact is actually feeling, judgement, added color.
Begin to get good at this, and it won’t purge all emotion and you won’t become a robot. You will start to take back some control of how you respond and your perspective will change.
If you knew you were going to die today, would an email from your boss sharing their concern that the client could decide to pull out of a deal, be something you would choose to get triggered about. No, your perspective would be different.
Treat each day, like today could be the last, and you’ll start to wonder does all this silliness really need to cloud my day.
Practice this and your day will be considerably more enjoyable.
Development Geek 