Will I care about this in five years? As I stare at whatever work I’ve just received or whatever presentation I’m working on, the answer is almost always a definitive no. Usually, I will have moved on from it in a month.
This rhetorical question is not an excuse to become complacent on the job, but it provide me with the outlook I need to step away from my desk when I’m feeling agitated, get some fresh air, or boost my blood sugar with a snack then, I can return to what I’m doing and- with the keen awareness that I’m not facing wartime disaster -do my best keep calm and carry on.
There is something you can learn from trying to gain this perspective when you're feeling overwhelmed, attacked or frustrated.
The case for this mentality is made so briefly in four humours you can read my articles on personality for that,
Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally, nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind: they are in completely different world from the one we live in.
When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.
Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you, what they say what they do and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds”
There are times when you may feel like a less-than-friendly email or snappy comment from your boss has something to do with your performance. And there are certainly times when this may be the case. But more often than not, the people you work with have, their own daily stressors that influence, how they’re interacting with the world things that, as points out have nothing to do with you.
Right Wolf?
We are all vulnerable to something called negativity bias, which means that the bad events of the day are more memorable than the good ones. But just because it’s our natural tendency to dwell-on the negative doesn’t mean we can’t push back against it.
In her book Taking the leap, Pema chodron illustrates the negative and positive sides of ourselves as two hungry wolves fighting in our hearts.
She ask readers to think of the wolf who wins the fight as the wolf who we choose to feed.
“Most of us have gotten so good at empowering our negativity and insisting on our rightness that the angry wolf gets shinier and shinier, and the other wolf is just there with its pleading eyes. But we're not suck with this way of being. When we're feeling resentment or any strong emotion, we can recognize that we are getting worked up and realize that right now we can consciously make the choice to be aggressive or to cool off. It comes down to choosing which wolf we want to feed.”