“Courage consists in the power of self-recovery.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The natural course of life is that sometimes things just don’t go the way we would prefer. A situation doesn’t turn out as you planned. A relationship might not deepen and grow as you had hoped or anticipated.
But, if nothing else, you have full control in determining how you will react when things don’t progress as you expected. And how you react can either keep you stuck in a negative situation or help you move forward with positivity and optimism. Here are a few tips to aid you in your recovery when things don’t go well for you.
1. Face it. Be honest with yourself. Acknowledge the facts to yourself. Recognize that the situation has progressed along a negative path.
2. Think about it. Reflect on what has happened. Analyze it. Look back over the situation and try to figure out what should have been your first clue that things were going in a different direction than you had expected.
3. Cut yourself some slack. You’re only human. Recognize that everyone has tough times. You don’t have to feel like the Lone Ranger here. Everyone you know has experienced challenging events and difficulties in their lives. It is very likely that someone you know is struggling right now with an issue that you are not aware of.
4. What’s your part in it? Consider your role. What was your part in events going the way they did? Could you have stopped the situation from occurring? Did you feel intuitively that it would happen?
If you need to make an apology or talk to someone about an error you made, do it right away! This way, you are “owning up to” and taking responsibility for correcting the part of the situation that you have had a hand in. You’ll learn important information for future, similar situations and move past the current event with grace and ease.
5. Reassure yourself. Tell yourself you’ll get through it. You know you will. Recognize that you have survived challenging events before. You can really give a boost to your self esteem by knowing that you’ll eventually get through this situation and be okay on the other side.
6. Use the skills you know. Remember how you navigated these negative experiences before. Exactly how did you get through the challenging situations in your past? Use those strategies again now to manage the current challenge.
7. Reevaluate and reconsider your goal. Is your objective still achievable now that the difficult situation has taken place? And probably a more important question is, do you even still want the same thing?
8. Establish a new objective, if necessary. If the original goal is no longer achievable, where can you go from here? How can you use this situation to your advantage? What’s the best thing you can work toward now? Look clearly at the situation. Has a possibility opened up that wasn’t there before? Once you determine your new goal, you have a new sense of direction and that’s critical to your happiness and success.
9. Call up your network. Seek support. When something goes awry, turn to your closest friends and family members for emotional support. Talk with them about the challenging situation. Lean on them a bit. After all that’s what friends are for. But be open to their counsel and suggestions.
10. Breathe! Shake it off. Going through the steps above can help you reach a point where you can let the disappointment go. Accept it and move on. Accept that it occurred and then keep on going. Shaking off the negative situation means you are empowering yourself to get past this and continue on to a brighter future.
You can rise like a phoenix above any situation that has gone awry. Use these 10 suggestions to get things going in the right direction again.
You will be amazed at the resources you find within yourself that you may not have known existed. Get started today. You can do it!
Thoughts?
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/3752937440/sizes/z/in/photostream/
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