“Somewhere between stimulus and response lies our greatest freedom, our ability to choose, our ability to choose our state.”
–Viktor Frankl
This “shelter in place” has my emotions going up and down AND my attitude responds accordingly. My “in-face” workshops and coaching calendar has been wiped clean. That’s not so bad, because some of my classes are with Zoom online. I’m having to pivot into doing more things online. For a hugging, results oriented, people person like me…the prospect of being alone with an empty calendar makes me tilt like a pin-ball machine. (For you younger people, you’ll have to google pinball machine.)
I decided to give away leadership training through the month of April. I had the best opportunity to share this in an online community of movers and shakers last week. I was so excited to potentially add value to some companies that maybe might be having a challenge leading through the chaos. I attended the GoToMeeting gathering and watched as people were having a hard time being unmuted to speak. They would have to jump out of the meeting and then come back in for the mute button to work. Hmmm…Please, God, don’t let that happen to me.
Yep, it happened to me and after jumping in and out twice–I COULDN’T EVEN GET BACK IN! Epic fail. Opportunity gone. Embarrassed, disappointed, sad, angry…those were just the tip of the iceberg of emotions that I was feeling. BUT, I had a class to teach in 45 minutes, so processing those emotions was impossible.
The subject of the class? The Habit of Happiness. Here’s the gist of the 45 minute teaching;
Happiness comes from within. It can’t be based on our outward life and circumstances because it’s conditional if we do that. Regardless of what’s happening, we get to choose our response, don’t we? There is that quarter second lag time in the brain between the stimulus and our reaction. We can re-act like we’ve always acted or we can choose a new response. We can choose to harvest the good from even the worst of our conditions and circumstances.
The state of happiness isn’t connected to our money, possessions, our jobs, or other people. We all know people who get exactly what or who they wanted, and it wasn’t enough. AND those things can disappear in a moment, can’t they?
We need to set the intention in advance to choose happiness. Dennis, my husband, quit drinking a couple of years after I did. We took separate cars to parties so I could leave if tempted to drink. I had six phone numbers that I could call when I felt crazy enough to go back to drinking again. I became extremely intentional in creating strategies to thrive as a sober person. We need to develop strategies for choosing happiness so it can become a habit…and these continued choices will make it a habit.
Simple, right? Are you kidding? Not always, but here’s what works for me, besides being intentional about choosing happiness. I created a mental image of the person that I want to become. Yes, I know this sounds unicornish, but, in the moments where I would rather throw things, curl up in a fetal position and cry, or trash talk to myself, I ask myself these questions:
Who do I want to be in this moment?
How would my mentors react?
What good can I harvest from this time?
What behavior do I want to model for others?
If the answers to these questions are not congruent with the person I want to become, then I need to make a change. After I taught the class, I allowed myself the time to process all those negative emotions. Since I’ve been practicing this, processing emotions takes less time. I’m creating a habit. (Please don’t think that I am successful at this every time. I am a work in progress, like everyone else.)
I could have allowed that circumstances to steal my happiness or I could choose to harvest the good. I decided that I was going to create a short video about my free offer, upload it to YouTube, and send that link to the director of that group to whom I was to present He said he would mail that link to all the participants. That was the good that I could harvest. I did what I could to make lemonade out of lemons.
Of course, depending on who you are and where you are in your life, certainly the conditions and circumstances are gonna be different for all of us. But the choice is ours to harvest, in that moment, our own happiness.
Do you need some coaching? Could you organization use some virtual training? I’d be delighted to serve you!
Squeezing lemons,
Jan
Jan McDonald
The John Maxwell Team
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