Yesterday I had a chance encounter with someone who has been going through a hard time. She quickly jumped from one bad event to another, describing little snapshots of vivid emotion. In the space of five minutes, my mood went from buoyant, to one where I felt I wanted to help, to one where I felt low myself. I offered an empathetic ear, and tried to offer some support through my listening and acknowledging of her problems. I got the feeling she just needed to offload, and that I was a safe person for her to do that with. When I offered ‘I guess you just need to focus of the good bits,’ she replied ‘there are no good bits.’ Then I said ‘then focus on the least bad bits.’
Whatever filters we are seeing the world through, our experience is subjective. My advice to my colleague may have seemed glib to her, but in that moment where it was a busy work situation, it was the only lifeline I could offer. I am confident that she will work through her problems and some will correct themselves with time on their own, but in that moment, my advice was simple.
When things are going awry, focus on the good bits.
This is something which is now second nature to me, and even when I’ve had a ‘bad day’ (in whatever sense) there are inevitably elements of good, or in the worst case, less bad. I now naturally remember those. But how do I do this? In NLP terms, playing around with the submodalities helps. For example, when I think about the day I’ve had, I imagine the ‘good bits’ in colour, with movement and dialogue, and the ‘bad bits’ I imagine as small, static black and white pictures. I also try to drain the emotion out of the ‘bad’ scenario and heighten the good feelings in the other (- this is an oversimplification, but it’s the best way I can describe it at present). Another NLP technique which is useful here is reframing. When you hear that someone has had a car accident, you might think ‘Oh what terrible luck to have had an accident,’. Or… you could reframe it as ‘Wow! He was lucky to have not got hurt,’ or ‘…not got hurt even more badly…’
These are both very useful ways to flip a situation in your head, and to change the way you think about a problem or situation. Deal with the problem in your own time, but for now, just focus on the good bits to get you through the day.
As always, I love to hear your thoughts. Leave me a comment below, or on Facebook or via Twitter 🙂