When something good happens, the happiness is short lived. We tell a few people about it, have an ice cream, have a good meal and we are done with it. We move on quickly to ‘what next’.
But, when something wrong happens, an expected outcome, the sadness or upset situation stays longer. Why? We don’t move to ‘what next’ quickly.
The ‘Upset state’ lasts longer as we begin to analyze as to what went wrong, what could have been done better, and we re-run the thoughts again and again in the mind, prolonging the suffering. Some amount of introspection is important to understand the learnings from it, but, brooding over it after a point is waste of time.
How about telling yourself that being upset should have an expiry date or end time, after which you need to snap out of it and continue focusing on the larger picture.
Here are 5 tips to snap out of an upset state real quick.
Ask yourself if you have a bad day or did you have a bad 10-20 minutes were you let your thoughts run undisciplined which led you to a bad vibe that you let carry you away. We run the story in our heads. Pay attention to your thoughts.
- Practice Acceptance:Don’t resist the negativity. Accept that it is happening.
- Don’t demonize:Avoid words like “this is terrible” in your inner voice. Stop demonizing people or incidents. Don’t be a victim.
- Express your feelings:First to yourself, then to others. Label your feelings. Don’t bottle it up.
- Forgive:If someone has caused you pain, forgive them and try to understand why they did it.
- Live in the present:At all times, use the past or the present only to gain insight or inspiration. Otherwise remember it is always now. And now is all you have.
About Author
Sandhya Reddy is a PCC Accredited Executive Coach and Leadership coach based in Bangalore, India. She is the Founder and Principal Coach at Chapter Two Coaching, a coaching consultancy that specializes in leadership development. She is a Certified Hogan Assessor and Coach. She has over 750+ hours of experience with coaching senior professionals. She has enabled personal transformation for over 1500+ individuals through coaching interventions, workshops, webinars and mentoring.
Chapter Two helps leaders in middle levels and senior levels engage better with their teams, peers and senior stakeholders. We help teams develop a growth and performance mindset, align better with the organizational culture and values and function more cohesively. We are also passionate about women’s leadership development and have developed a practice around it. We enable leadership development through 1:1 coaching interventions and through a set of curated leadership and personal transformational workshops.