—
Let me set this up with a situation I have accomplished in my life more than once. I wake-up and dive for my cell phone only to find that my service is shut off. I next check for the ‘dark text message’ I ignored three days earlier to confirm that, in fact, I blew it! Now the next thing hits—the very reason you wanted to use your phone and that is to call the office to say you are running late.
How about this one? It’s the end of the day on payday. You get your paycheck as you clock out. You open the envelope to see how much is there because it will be a close payday this time around only to find they took out for uniforms THIS payday instead of next payday by error! Oh God! Accounting is located in another building and is closed already.
This one happened to many times when I was young and married: Come home from work on a Friday evening after 5 pm to find that I didn’t have power although the neighbor’s stereo was playing loudly like usual. Panic!
Are you laughing or crying right now? I’m on the floor because thank God that doesn’t happen anymore!
Life can and does go wrong in an instant and we, as humans, get to deal with it or fall to the floor and in a lump of human pity to cry. I might try that lump sometime and not today.
What do you do when the life train derails and you find yourself upside down beside the road? For me, I’ve been down the pity road too many times as a young man searching for myself. Today I step back, ask what just happened—what triggered me—then I find a memory attached to the incident. Interesting, isn’t it? We like to call it situational neutralization.
Here they are again: 1) Ask what just happened? 2) What triggered me? 3) Find a memory similar to what happened, find the person’s face in that memory who is influencing the high emotions in the memory and neutralize them verbally. The result is a re-patterning of the brain so you can be aware of similar events occurring to you again and to alert you that something is coming.
Today sucks and I can prove it is my story today although I did not have the above things happen to me. I wrote a proposal that was missing one significant part. The result, you guessed it—we were removed from the competition. It would have been a single paragraph in length and would explain ‘how’ we do what we do. Simple and SO important to the proposal. My fault plain and simple.
What did I do about this? I took myself out of the blame game by using the three items of neutralization described above, found a memory, ‘nailed’ a person that caused me some pain when I was young, and neutralized him hard and out loud.
Now I’m rocking my day out and reaching out to you in hopes of changing your day too.
—
—
Photo credit: Getty Images