Make Friends With Your Frustrations
Your friends are supposed to help you out when you’re in trouble, right?! What if you could make friends with your frustrations so it can help you see possibilities which you weren’t able to see before?
Frustration is part of life. Mine, yours, your mom’s, your husband’s and your children’s neighbour. Everyone, quite literally, has experienced frustration multiple times in life and will most certainly experience it again. None of us can escape or avoid it no matter how hard we try. If all of us experience frustration many times, it begs the question: Is frustration a negative emotion? How is it felt in the body? How do you feel it in your body?
Well, if you believe frustration is a positive emotion and feeling frustrated gives you extra juice to push harder, you’re winning in life. And that’s amazing! Good on you! But for the rest of us, who experience frustration’s negative effects more often than we’d like to admit, how better could our lives be if we learned how to see frustration through different lenses, thereby changing our perception of the overall experience of being frustrated. If you’re anything like me, a profoundly imperfect person, frustration feels like an almost unbearable annoying feeling that eats me up inside.
Then, let me start off by getting something out of the way already. If you want to feel amazing and experience your innate greatness, you can’t escape but look humbly and honestly at the hard truth of reality.
So, to achieve the level of success you desire and deserve, you must first learn how to handle your frustrations. You can no longer avoid it, disregard it or pretend it isn’t there. Because it obviously is. So, the first lesson here is to acknowledge that frustration is so real that you can see it everywhere you look and you can feel it in various situations in your daily life. Therefore, you must accept it unconditionally. As they say “everything you resist persists. And everything you fight fights back just as hard”.
Now that you’ve accepted the feeling is real and if you fight it, it will not only persist but fight back just as hard, what if you could learn something from it? What if these disturbing sensations were trying to teach you something? What would it be trying to shine light upon? Well, the answers invariably vary from situation to situation. However, just taking into account the fact that you’re asking these kinds of questions, you’re sending your brain, nervous system, and whole body on a quest to find that out?
Imagine that your brain is filled with little cells that operate like factory workers. They don’t question very much what they’ve been told to do. They simply do what they’re told to do, or in more extreme circumstances, they do what they think they were told. Thus, by thinking “OMG, my mom doesn’t get me. It’s so frustrating”, you’re signalling your brain and nervous system to go on a journey to find reasons why your mom doesn’t get you. Guess what, your brain is now messaging your whole body to gear up and find reasons why your mom doesn’t get you. It doesn’t question whether it’s true or not, whether it’s beneficial or detrimental to the quality of your life. All those factory workers know for a fact now that the boss (YOU) believe that your mom doesn’t get you. And so they go off to prove such belief. And guess what?! These factory workers are really good at doing what they’re told and they’ll find validation for that belief literally everywhere you look, in everything you taste, smell and hear and in every interaction you have.
Likewise, if you think “OMG, my mom doesn’t get me and it’s so frustrating. But, what could there possibly be that I’m missing which is making me feel so frustrated?" What is this feeling trying to show me that I’m not seeing?” What if you accepted that is a fact of life that your mom, your partner, your boss and everyone else will not get you. And instead, you challenged yourself to look for ways to understand your mom, your partner, your boss and everyone else? What if you played a game with yourself and every time you connected with someone - someone got you, you’d reward yourself with something you like very much? Like give yourself a prize or a reward.
By engaging in these kinds of challenges with yourself, you’re claiming responsibility to change how you feel. You’re assuming a position of power over the emotion you’re feeling. In fact, you’d have completely changed how you interact with frustration. It would no longer be felt as though it’s something to avoid at all cost, but something to chase after. At the end of the day, growth is a human need. All of us need to grow in order to feel alive, to feel inspired, to feel happy and content. If we’re not growing, we’re dying. Embarking on such a personal challenge to make yourself actively overcome frustration may very well enhance your emotional fitness which will in turn allow you to face every situation in your life without fear or anxiety of not having your expectations met. You’ll be living your life based upon the intention of overcoming whatever frustration is thrown at you, as opposed to living a life based upon the expectation that everyone must understand you and everything must conform with your whimsical desire . Otherwise, you’ll drop the lip and throw a tantrum.
I can only suspect that if you asked any one or all these questions whenever you’re frustrated, your brain and body would embark on a journey to find ways in which you can contribute to the creation of a better environment for everyone to get you. Especially, when you play this little game, you will feel more engaged and somewhat responsible to making peace with everything and everyone in your life.
I read a book once that said something like “success is buried on the other side of frustration”. Thus, if you aren’t intellectually and emotionally fit to handle frustration, you aren’t fit for success. YET!!! This word is crucial for our personal development. None of us were taught any of this at school, so how are we supposed to know this?
Well, it’s no one’s job other than yours to find out what can possibly make your life better. That’s why is so important to have patience. There’s no rush or deadline for you to learn to deal with your emotions. It’s not about getting to a place where you’ll be emotionally fit for life, but it’s about learning new ways of doing the same thing in a different, more creative and fun way. Imagine that you take a given route to work everyday. You know exactly where the road gets jammed, where you can speed up a bit over the speed limit and where traffic accidents happen more often. But today, for whatever reason that road is completely blocked. What do you do? Do you stay home and call it a day? You call in sick? Or you ring up the office truly frustrated and say that you’re going to be late because you were unprepared to take a different route even though you’ve been going to the same office for the past 17 years? The point is that if you only took the route for 17 years, you’ve negated all other possibilities, hence when you must take a different approach, you find yourself stressed out, stuck and powerless.
I look at my emotional fitness and personal development like a never-ending game of learning, finding and even creating new ways to go to the same place, so that if any particular way is blocked for whatever reason, I have the capacity to do things differently without any kind of disturbing or frustrating effects. It’s hard to practice it every day, but if you do as often as you remember - you can give yourself cues throughout the day to remind yourself - you won’t even realise that a given situation had once the power to make you frustrated. Make you feel disconnected with the inevitable and unavoidable truth of reality.
Whether you believe it or not, frustration can be a positive emotion. When you feel frustrated, something is trying to show you two things:
that you truly believe in yourself and in your ability to do better than you currently are;
that the solution to your problem is closer than you realise. All you’ve got to do is change the outlook on the issue at hand, try something wildly different. After all, feeling frustrated means that we’ve tried something over and over and we haven’t obtained the results we were looking for. YET!!!
So, to wrap this up, let’s just go over the strategy to overcome your frustrations by enabling and empowering yourself to use your frustration to your advantage:
First, you’ve got to accept that frustration exists, and it is very real. Once you’ve made peace with its existence, you’ve freed yourself from suffering from it, you’re left with the pain of having to deal with it nevertheless.
To deal with your frustration, you’ve got to ask yourself questions to find out what’s right in front of you but you can’t seem to be able to see? What can you actively do about it? What if you could change something inside you that would take you from feeling frustrated to feeling something else. Maybe a strong desire, maybe pride, maybe awe or even amazement. Make your choice!
Once you’ve asked yourself questions and made a decision as to how you’d like to feel instead of frustrated, ordain the factory workers, that live inside your mind and work for you, go about their businesses and find ways or create new possibilities to change the situation. All you need to do is let go of the story you’ve been telling yourself - and the factory workers - and have a little patience.
