Flipswitch

Alright, when I sit down and feel like writing to you guys I find myself coming up with ideas, thinking about them, then deciding they aren’t good enough or won’t make sense. Other times, my colleagues beat me to the punch, or I find I don’t really know what I want to say about something, just that it’s bothering me. So, this sets up well for me to talk about frustration, and I will let it take off from here.

Getting frustrated sucks, even if it is something as simple as me not being able to express myself through this blog. Lately, it has caused me to not even want to think about what I might want to write, which hasn’t helped me solve the problem of getting an idea across to you guys. The experience though has given me something to write about. When I am first confronted with frustration I resolve myself to persevere, so in this case I thought harder and harder about what I could write about. Every idea though seemed too high minded or altruistic, and after about 3 days of thinking about what to write I finally decided I would come back to it later. I figured I would let myself think about it without having to write about it right away, but the frustration kept mounting and eventually I found myself hesitant to even sit at the computer to try and type.

I am sure you have all faced more intense frustration than this example (I know I have), but you can look at simple examples in your own life and find patterns to how you react to certain situations. In this case, I found out that after butting my head up against a problem and not being able to solve it, I became unwilling to want to deal with it anymore. How does this help me? Right now, I’m not sure, but I am able to predict before hand when I might become overly frustrated now. Knowing this I might be able to take myself out of the situation before the frustration completely gets to me that way I can come back to the problem sooner and less discouraged.

I don’t know what you will take from this, or if it even made sense, but at the least maybe the next time you get frustrated or angry you can look back on the experience and learn something from it. Analyze it a little bit, find some lesson and don’t just chalk it up to chance. Like triggering mania or depression, there are triggers to becoming angry, frustrated and irritable. Sometimes you can’t help it, but there are some situations you can take yourself out of before you have to experience these emotions.

I know my example seemed trivial, but think about Newton and his discovery of gravity…it all came about because an apple fell on his head!

Until we convene again! Ryan