Getting Past Frustration

Have you ever had a bad day? Perhaps your day began with driving in slow traffic only to arrive at work to realize that you missed a work deadline.  Or, you had to deal with rude customers or your children presented you with another challenge that you have no idea how to handle.  What is the key to surviving all the stress we encounter?  Simply this — we must decide that we will not allow people and circumstances to determine our attitude.  Stress is not what happens to us but it is our response to what happens.  It’s also true that you can’t control everything that happens to you in life but you can control your response.  You can’t control what people say about you, nor can you change how people treat you, but once again, you do have control over your response to negative people and the circumstances they create for you.

The greatest weapon we have over stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.  You can either dwell on your feelings of frustration or you can push through your frustrations by changing what you think about your situation.  Replaying thoughts in your mind can bring about anxiety.  Many people spend too much time worrying about things that have happened in the past or they worry about things that could happen in the future.  Do you know that 99% of the things that we worry about never happen?  Our mind usually worries about things it is convinced are true but, most of the time, are actually not true.

Your life will not get better by chance – it can only get better with change.  Sometimes we must get to a point of total frustration before we are ready to make a change.  The key to getting passed what causes stress in your life is to make a decision to keep moving. Allow stress to propel you forward and not to remain stuck. Encourage yourself by using your energy to work towards a solution to your problem.  Fight your way through frustration by replacing negative thoughts with thoughts of success.  Success is on the other side of frustration.  Focus on the presentReturning your focus to the present will help you accept and let go of what you cannot control.  It will also help you realize that you can’t change the past, and that the future hasn’t happened yet, so it’s counter-productive to spend your time worrying about the past or the future.

It’s a tough world and we have to be persistent.  Quitting is giving into frustration.  Don’t turn back.  Accept the frustration as a challenge – and love it! Quitting is another form of giving in to frustration.  We have to be persistent in order to accomplish our goal.  Never turn back in midstream.  Follow it through to the end. When the going gets tough, and a little voice says, “It’s not worth it” tell yourself “it is worth it!” In the Book of Proverbs, King Solomon said: “The righteous person falls seven times and gets up. The evil person falls just once.” It’s important to recognize that the righteous person is not defined as someone who never makes a mistake. Rather, the person who achieves greatness is one who keeps trying again and again. He sees frustration as only a passing nuisance, and therefore never gives up. In fact, his falling seven times may be precisely how he became great. The next time you get stuck in frustration remember all the other times you moved through it and succeeded. Believing that you can succeed is half the battle.