How to Let it All Go and Be Happy
August 23rd, 2008 by AndyThe other day I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who had observed that when when we are in stressful situations, I appear to be completely unaffected. He didn’t believe that he was capable of doing this and explained to me how the stress keeps building up on him to the point where he can barely handle it anymore. I began to explain to him how I learned this skill because understanding my store in essential in understanding how to apply my technique to your own story.
I owe my power to my first job, I not only endured far too much stress, but learned a few things about life that I probably would have missed otherwise. At a point, just a few months before I left that job, I was stressed far past my breaking point, drank way more than I should have, and learned the most important lesson. Nothing that keeps you from living your life really matters.
See, up to this point, I had bent over backwards for everyone, including those who didn’t deserve it, and now I was paying dearly for neglecting myself. I now realized it was time for me to do for me, and let everyone else fend for themselves. Now there are 2 things that are important to me: The happiness of me and my daughter.
The true key to letting go is being able to change your focus from the negative to the positive. I have noticed that when I do this many people interpret this as if I don’t care about the negative impact of things. In reality I don’t, and neither do I because most of this negativity is anchored to the past, and can’t be changed even while there are things that can be changed now that will have a positive effect in the future. If you focus your care an attention on the horror of these negative things anchored to the past, you can’t focus fully on these positive things in the present that can allow you to at least somewhat recover from those negative things.
One example that I experience a lot and I’m sure many of you can relate to is a project that is about to miss its deadline. It might be a week or 2 days before, and there are people running around screaming "There’s no way we’ll have it done in time! It’s impossible". While this is happening, I’m calmly walking to get coffee before settling back in at my desk to get as much done as I can. I don’t concern myself with the deadline at all.
Why doesn’t the deadline bother me? To put it quite simply, from my perspective, it doesn’t matter. It was set in the past, and no matter much mental anguish I devote to it, its not going to change. If I get all worked up and out of shape I won’t be able to focus, and I’ll get even less done in time.
Let me explain how I determine whether or not I should worry about something. The first question I ask myself every single time is "Can I change it now?" If the answer is no, I put it completely out of my mind. Next, I ask myself "does it make sense to change it?" If the answer is yes I find a way to get rid of any negativity, and focus my attention on only the positive things.
Taking the project deadline as an example. Since I can’t change the deadline, I don’t worry about the deadline at all anymore. Instead I look at what I can change. I can work on the project, and get as much done as possible. But knowing that this would be a huge feat to accomplish in so little time (a negativity) I change my focus yet again. Now I focus only on the task I am working on at this moment which I know I can complete within the next 15 minutes or hour. When that’s done, I refocus on the next task.
I’m sorry this mainly explains how I use this technique at work. This happened because this is the situation where I use it the most, and can most easily explain it. This can, however, be applied to any stressful situation to help you focus your attention on the important things. Take this example for instance.
You are sitting, watching TV, when you hear your child fall in the other room. When you enter the room you discover him laying there on the floor hurt. Many people would scream at the top of their lungs, and panic in this situation. What does panicking accomplish? Nothing. Can you change the fact that the child fell? No. Can you change what others might think tomorrow? No. None of that matters because it doesn’t help right now. So if you refocus your attention on actually helping the child, you’ll find yourself much more calm and collected as you do so. As much as you may not like thinking about this example, I used it for a very important reason. Especially when you’re dealing with children, your reaction to a situation can have a drastic effect on their reaction to the same and similar situations now and in the future. If you’re calm and collected, they will be more calm as well.
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