The Best Laid Plans and Habit #3
Couldn’t resist taking this golden opportunity to share a perfect example of the value of Finding Positive Aspects in Negative Occurrences; Habit #3 in the Attitude Adjustment Course. This glowing example was offered by my daughter last week when she went to take her dog for his monthly allergy shot.
FRUSTRATION
With a three year old and several other dogs Alexis normally performs this errand while her daughter is napping and someone can babysit. Thursday she decided to multi task and take the 45 minutes drive to the vet with her daughter and one of her other dogs. As she arrived at her destination there was a note on the door announcing new and reduced office hours and the different locations now available for visits; also a 45 minute drive from her house. This news meant she was not going to be able to accomplish this task this day.
With a packed schedule speckled with errands for her daughter’s birthday celebration on Saturday in addition to her normal duties she was in a word FRUSTRATED. Now there would not be an opportunity to get the dogs shot until sometime next week.
The first thing she did was call me, huffing and puffing and intent on circling the following issues:
1) She had wasted an hour plus of her tightly planned day and accomplished nothing.
2) The new office hours/locations now meant that she would have to carefully plan the visit in the future and loose the flexibility of working this task into her schedule and arriving when the opportunity occurred.
3) She felt her ENTIRE day was now ruined.
I let her rant and rave a bit and then offered her some of my “motherly coach advice” which, just so you know, doesn’t work on family members and least of all daughters.
She would have none of it. She was intent on focusing on the” issues”. The more she spoke the more negative she became about the remainder of her day.
I tried to bring her back to reality using one of the steps in habit #3.
Coach mom: Is there anything you can do to immediately to rectify the situation at this moment?
Frustrated daughter: No, no of course there is nothing I can do. I am furious… the day is ruined and this is way too long of a car trip for Kenzi without a break. She is becoming restless, I put a movie in for her which won’t turn on and now I’ll have to pull over and, and, and, and, (More ranting).
Coach mom: What would be your options?
Frustrated daughter: (Louder) I don’t have any options; this is terrible now this will be even more difficult …. I have spent the whole day on this and accomplished nothing and now I’ll never get the rest of what I need to do… etc. etc. (by the way, the time is 11:00 am in the morning!)
Don’t do this coach thing on me. I am not looking for a solution I am simply venting.
It was at this point I realized that I was not going to be able to get her to look at anything other than the problem and participate in watching it grow exponentially with the length of the conversation.
My options: Listen to her rant and rave and lower my own energy in the process or express how sorry I was to hear her day was not going well and hang up. I chose the latter. (See you can teach old dogs new tricks!)
Was that the end of it? Not quite, she immediately called my mother to rant some more where she received the predictable advice of how she had too many animals and duties and not enough time for them all and the logical solution was to reduce the number of animals, thereby creating more time for her. (Yikes!)
This is fighting language for my animal advocating rescuing daughter whose apparent passion is to find a way to save them all; TODAY, if not sooner!
The outcome; Not as traumatic as it appeared and the options were:
1) Find another vet closer to her home who could administer the monthly shot.
2) Purchase the serum and administer the shot herself, an option offered and tried at the beginning of the treatment which did not work out.
3) Succumb to planning the exact day of the month at the preferred location and show up then.
Of course she came to these options, or at least I think she did. However instead of stopping to look at her options, choosing a course of action, when she would do it, writing it down and letting it go for the rest of the day she left it in her head and it still rears its ugly head in our conversations.
Other bad news; her sour mood continued throughout the day exhausting her. She ultimately took a nap with her daughter and did not accomplish the other 5 errands on her list. The remainder of the weekend… well I think you can imagine, we’ve all been there; my poor baby.
Does any of this sound familiar to you? It certainly does to me. (It’s always easier to see it in someone else!)
The good news is if we set a conscious intention and practice the habit of pivoting out of these incidents we can change the way we react to them when they occur to us.
If you are interested in learning more about the 5 simple habits that can change your life sign up for the 21 Day Attitude Adjustment Course!
P.S. By the way, watch for the upcoming F.R.E.E. Attitude Adjustment Workshop coming soon!
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Deborah Hayes, CTA Life Coach
Empowering women to live a life of consequence, a life without regrets that is your own unique version of the life you love. About Deborah
deborah@womenintransitiononline.com
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