Recovering Pessimist
One of the main areas of personal evolution I have been working on in 2009 is my pessimistic tendencies as well as my tendency to over-react instead of over-respond to situations. For the most part I have had a great deal of success and have become a much more positive person. On my recent vacation we even had a friend that we had not seen for a long time comment on the fact that she noticed I was much more positive.
I have been feeling pretty good about the changes I have made and have had to spend less of my energy focusing on being optimistic; it has started to feel more natural than it ever has in the past.
However, what I forgot is that I am still a work in progress, and that, by not being mindful of my positivity as much lately I have put myself in a position to have a breakdown.
The breakdown
It happened this morning, and it happened in a big way. After returning from our vacation my wife and I discovered that a bottle of soy sauce had exploded in our luggage and our clothes were covered. One thing led to another and the over-reacting pessimist busted out:
I yelled.
I ranted.
I blew things out of proportion.
I made extreme conclusions.
I announced ultimatums.
I lost it.
In terms of my positive – negative energy buckets, in a matter of minutes I filled my bucket with so much red that there is nothing I could have done over the rest of the day to balance it out with blue. In one uncontrolled negative, pessimistic, reactive moment I made sure that my day was red, with no hope of recovering.
You know what….it’s all right
After the dust had settled and my wife and I had separated for a bit I started to reflect on the situation and got ready to beat myself up for the breakdown. Then I realized there was no point in adding negative feelings to negative feelings and send myself further into a downward spiral. I realized it was all right, the breakdown wasn’t the end of the world. I may not have been able to save that day, but I could continue to improve all of the “next days”.
Improving yourself personally is tough work. Improving yourself personally isn’t something that is going to happen overnight, in an instant. Improving yourself is a process that is going to have its ups and downs, and, hopefully, over time there are more ups than downs.
So, instead of beating myself up and reflecting on what had just happened, I went the route of the optimist and started reflecting on all of the moments in the past year where I have succeeded in being positive. By focusing on the positive experiences I changed my attitude to “more positive” instead of “more negative”. I was also able to focus on how being positive made me feel and compare that to how being negative made me feel.
Perspective shift
Then I had the most important realization of all:
if I wasn’t trying to improve myself the breakdown wouldn’t have been a breakdown, it would have been the norm.
So next time you shift back into old behaviours: being pessimistic, having a smoke or a drink, yelling at your kids. Whatever the breakdown is, remember that you are working on it, and that the fact you even had a breakdown means that you are doing better than you were before you were even trying to change yourself for the better. Then, don’t focus on the feelings of the breakdown, concentrate on how you feel when you are having success with your challenging behaviour. This will help you to shift your perspective back in the correct direction.
And you know what? With this attitude in mind, I apologized to my wife, spent the rest of the day being positive, and managed to turn the overall day from red to blue.
What are you trying to improve in your life? What do you do to deal with breakdowns? I would love to know what works for you.