Turn Your Bad Days Around
Sometimes you just hit a crappy day where nothing goes right, or all the news is bad, or you just dont feel up for it. It took me a long time to learn the first step to turning it around:
1. Identify that its going badly and declare that out loud.
Somehow turning your observation into speech helps to make it real. Yes, the bad day is happening. Sometimes the number of bad things that have happened is not high, its just specific things that are particularly bad. On to step two:
2. Verbally list the things that have gone wrong so far and rate them. For example you lost some investment money but maybe you knew it was at risk. However, you didnt expect that biting call from your ex.
Rating the lousy things helps to put them in perspective. One biggie could be all it took to tank the day. Lets hit step three:
3. Understand that you can make a decision about how to handle this.
This is the one that took me forever to understand myself. If I have declared that the day is bad and I know why, now I can actually do something about it. I can, for example, give myself permission to wallow for an hour. You can easily lose hours in self pity or anger if you havent done the top three steps. However, if you follow these steps and give yourself permission to wallow in your feelings, its amazing how unappealing this choice instantly becomes. So then, step four;
4. Do something proactive.
You dont need to leap tall buildings in a single bound. A small thing can be big when the day is at low tide. For example, after that unexpected negative phone call, take a time-out and ask yourself, what can I learn from this? For me, this one question opens all kinds of doors. It allows me to take a step back and look at things from a different angle.
If I can learn even one thing from a bad day, it turns it around. Some things we can only learn from bad days but in truth there are learning opportunities all around us. The more you ask yourself what you can learn, the more apparent these opportunities become. When you ask this question all the time, good and bad days transform into easier or harder learning days.
Recent Comments
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Thanks Linser for your terrific post on how to turn a bad day into a good one!
I like the question: What can I learn from this?
Failure is a part of the process to getting successful!
When we are in the middle of the stress, it just seem to be awful, but, taking a step back an looking at it from a different angle is a great advice.
:-)
Im trying to shift from thinking of it as failure rather than just another sort of learning opportunity -- the harder kind. All failures could ultimately be avoided if we only knew the right things, but we didnt. Im starting to see how a lot of these missed learning opportunities are due to emotionalism. We feel defeated, or we feel angry or have a chip on our shoulder about something... emotional baggage makes us poor and resistant learners. I see it in business where a fellow biz owner reacts emotionally instead of setting that aside and actually looking at the possible resolutions on the table. And of course I see these things because I've done almost all of them!
Thanks for adding these interesting thoughts, Linser.
I learn best by making my own experiences. But I always hope to learn from other successful people and so be able to avoid mistakes.
So true if we could react more rationally instead of emotionally there possibly would be less trouble and more work done.
:-)
For sure! Problem is, I might think Im being rational.... and then finally figure out that no, I was reacting. Hard to see your own actions in an objective light.
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Great advice - you can let yourself be taken out by the negativity or you can do something about it. Easy to say, harder to do but always worth the try.
Well said, yes, what do you lose by trying? Everything to gain.