How to make situations work for you.

Hello, My Friends

One of the most difficult things to understand is the reason why people do what they do. It is also one of the most fascinating things about people.

Each and everyone of us, has a reason for what we do, and often no-one else gets why we do it, and sometimes even we don’t know why we do what we do.

Take a friend who says she’ll meet you for lunch on Tuesday, then on Monday she phones you and wants to change the day to Wednesday, you want to catch up with your friend so you agree, Wednesday morning arrives and your friend cancels, saying she’d love to meet up on Friday for afternoon tea. What do you do?

Do you agree, again? You say yes, but you’re a bit angry at her for giving you the run around. You want to know what is going on with her.

Do you say, no? Seething inside because you feel you’ve been more than generous in moving your schedule around to accommodate her.

Do you set a new day and time that suits you? Deciding to take charge of the situation.

You are feeling let down and disappointed in your friend, you feel like she is disrespecting you, deliberately being a nuisance to you. You begin to wonder if she is your friend at all.

Maybe you are taking her side stepping lunch with you as a personal attack on you as a person, you may be feeling guilty for saying, “yes”, when you want to say, “no”, or maybe you are feeling bad because you said, “no”, but you know your motive was one of revenge or payback for being mucked around.

My question would be, What am I making this lunch mean?

That she doesn’t want to meet with me, that she has some important things going on, that lunch just isn’t that important to her, or that I’m not that important to her.

The way I see her rescheduling lunch, tells a lot about where I am in my life.

The situation is the situation, it is a fact. She planned to have lunch, then re-booked, then re-booked again. Those are the facts.

The tricky and interesting bit is the story that is being told around why she is re-booking lunch.

In truth, because no conversation has been had, only your friend knows the reason for re-booking so many times. Everything you are thinking is speculation. Stories you have made up in your head to justify what you are feeling.

Thoughts are that powerful, they give us emotional responses when none is required. And depending where we are on our journey of personal development, the stories can be quite demoralizing and negative. We can end up running our friend out of our life because of the way we perceive she has treated us.

When in truth the entire story is in our mind.

When this or something similar happens to you and your brain wants to go jumping to conclusions and emotional responses without any evidence, ask yourself a couple of key questions.

1. What are the facts of this situation? (A fact is what has happened, time, date, who was there. Non emotional facts.)
2. What emotion am I feeling about this situation? (Usually one word, eg, hurt, betrayed)
3. Does this emotion serve me? (This can be tricky to answer, depending on the emotion, maybe you feel revengeful, but you have been taught as a child that this behaviour is unacceptable. So you struggle to admit to yourself what your true emotion is, adding another layer of emotions on top of the existing emotion. ) ( There is no right or wrong emotion, no good or bad emotion. Emotion is a vibrational sensation, that your body feels and your brain interprets. What you do with the emotion either serves you or it doesn’t, and it’s a good idea to ensure it doesn’t hurt anyone else either.)
4. If the emotion serves you, then feel it, and let it guide you to an outcome that will make you happy. If the emotion doesn’t serve you, then you have a decision to make, you can deal with it in whatever your go to avoidance system is, or you can admit to yourself exactly what you are feeling.
5. What thought is creating this emotion? Finding the short sentence behind the emotion will unlock what is going on for you. It could be, “She always treats me with disrespect.” Does this sentence serve you? Is this how you want to think and feel? a) about yourself, b) about your friend.
6. What would be a better thought to think, that will create a better emotion for you to feel? This might be, “I always think she is disrespecting me.” “I will use my red velvet rope to respect myself.” (Putting a boundary around you, that you choose to uphold for yourself, like my schedule is important to me, and changing it at a whim is not something I do.) (So when your friend cancels the first time, you state that your schedule is full until, and you give a date and time. This way you are holding space for your friend, and you are honouring yourself and your schedule.
7. Then you get to feel good about yourself and your friend, and continue on with living until the new scheduled time for lunch.

This may seem long winded at the beginning, but it saves so much emotional energy in the long term, and the more red velvet rope policies you have and enforce the less emotional drama you have in your life.

The most important response in any situation is yours.

It is the only response you have any control over.

Your emotions are part of what makes you human, and makes you so unique. You get to choose your emotional responses on purpose. Default responses are usually responses that are trained into you from childhood, and once served a purpose of keeping you safe. Now you are an adult you have the power to decide if these default responses are helping you to achieve what you want in life or not.

Until next time, begin practicing with your emotions, find the describing word that tells what the emotion is, then go hunting with the tenacity of a detective to find the thought creating the emotion. Remember, it is never about anyone else, all our responses are from what we are thinking, which create a vibration in our body, which our brain attributes an emotion to, and these emotions then guide us into what type of action to take. Often the action we take is from our subconscious mind, which has had a particular thought, drilled into it so it becomes automatic. (Now that is a whole different kettle of fish, that this process will unravel if you are diligent.)

oxoxo Linda

As a certified Life Coach, I help you to help yourself, so you can create a well lived life your way. 

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