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I have to start by giving my apologies for missing last weeks Thursday thought – it has in fact inspired this weeks’ topic – dealing with life’s little frustrations – those situations where in the moment you feel extremely frustrated, annoyed or aggravated, but on reflection are not the end of the world.
A week past Monday my laptop downloaded a windows update, which unknowingly to me at the time was to mean I could do very little work on my laptop for the rest of the week. Tuesday I was out all day delivering a workshop, which I did not need to use my laptop for, and so it was Wednesday morning when I discovered the issue. Thinking it was just a glitch, I took it with me to meet a friend for a bit of co-working, but when I tried to switch on, I got the loading screen with the loading circle….circling…and circling….and circling. Great, switch off, switch on…and the same. After an hour or so of trying and hoping it would load up hoping with very little success, I gave up, and spent most of the afternoon reading a CPD book I also had with me.
This scuppered my plans for the week, and as you can imagine caused me no end of frustration. When I finally got it sorted on Thursday by managing to login for long enough to roll back the update I had one and a half days of work to get caught up on, and missed publishing my usual Thursday post.
’Tomorrow’ I thought ‘I’ll do a Friday thought post tomorrow instead’….as you know this did not happen either as I continued to play catch up and pushed it back again. By the time Monday rolled around I decided to wait, and use it as the substance for this week’s post instead.
This is one example of a particular situation where things did not go to plan. Generally I am fairly adaptable and tend to deal with stress pretty well – especially in situations like this where it is something relatively minor, but could very easily blow out of proportion and let it become a cloud over my head, bleeding into my mood and the rest of my life for the few days before I got back on track.
Personally I deal with this by consciously or unconsciously asking myself some of the following questions: what are the consequences of this? How big of an impact will this actually have in real terms? Is it worth getting stressed about/wasting energy on/letting it affect other areas of my life? What do I have control of in the situation, and what do I need to let go of? What can I learn from this situation to prevent/mitigate this type of situation in future?
In this example, while I am aware I have committed to posting weekly, the consequences were that my usual post did not go out as planned. However, the impact is (I hope!) fairly minimal – I am confident that those of you who have begun following me whether on Instagram, linkedin or Patreon will be forgiving in the circumstances. I felt it was more important to focus on finishing some paid work I needed to complete, and therefore it was better to put my energy towards that rather than beating myself up about not meeting a self imposed restriction. I didn’t have control over the initial situation of my laptop not cooperating, but I did have control on how I dealt with the aftermath – getting back on track with other work and using this example as content for this weeks post.
The learning point and reminder is for me to put mitigating measures in place – it has always been my intention to have some prepared posts – a backlog that can go out at any time. Things I can post if I find myself in a similar position, where I am unable to write based on a current/recent thought that has come up for me during the preceding week – and that is why I plan to spend some time tomorrow doing just this, getting ahead of myself so that I am prepared if something similar happens in future.
So, on reflection, I deal with these situations by focusing on what I can do to fix or resolve it. My question to you is how do you deal with life’s frustrations which may feel big in the moment, but on reflection are unlikely to have a major impact? How do you let go of that emotion? What actions do you take to learn and move forward from those situations?
Vibrantly Revive 