Life Throwing You Curveballs? The Top 3 Techniques To Handle It With Ease.

 

Imagine this: you’re having a great day. Maybe you’re at work, or maybe you’re out doing something else. You may even be on vacation. You feel happy, excited and enthusiastic. But then something happens. Something unexpected. And definitely unpleasant! Maybe it’s an angry email from an irate customer. Maybe it’s a troubling phone call from a family member. Maybe it’s a letter from the IRS. And right away, your happy, winning mindset is gone. So what do you do when this happens to you? April gives you three surprisingly simple mindset-shifting techniques in today’s episode of the Winning Mindset Mastery Podcast. If you listen to this podcast on a regular basis, you’ve definitely heard her talk about technique #1. But the other two may surprise you. Curious to find out more? Listen to today’s episode of the Winning Mindset Mastery Podcast!

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Life Throwing You Curveballs? The Top 3 Techniques To Handle It With Ease.

One of the cool things that will happen to you as you continue to work on developing a winning mindset is you will develop your technique for getting yourself into a better place with your thoughts. Keep in mind that having a winning mindset doesn’t mean you don’t ever think negative thoughts. It means that you can control the way that you react to them. If you are wondering if you react to negative thoughts, I will give you some physical signs that you do.

Let’s say that you get an email from someone or a bill that you weren’t expecting and your heart starts bumping a little faster. You might feel some heat on your neck or face. You might feel your breath quicken, find yourself talking faster, or feel you need to do something quickly. These are all a few signs of a physical reaction, which lets you know that your thoughts have gone off in a different direction. You will notice this anytime your thoughts go to a place that isn’t helpful to you.

There are a variety of techniques we can use. I’m going to talk about three of those. 2 of them I have learned from others and 1 of them that I made up by myself over time because I thought it better explained what people were trying to teach me. I’m going to share it with you in case you need it broken down that way. It is helpful.

The first technique is one I talk about quite a bit. It is the one that applies to most situations and is also the easiest to learn, which is reframing. You can look at reframing in a couple of different ways. One, it is either trying to see situations as happening for you instead of to you, which you can do by thinking about other things that have happened in the past that seemed like they were a negative event, but after much more time had passed, you could see how it worked out for you. You wouldn’t change it. You were glad that it had happened.

 

You can also reframe by becoming objective about the situation. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is either to have the help of someone you like and trust or to look at it as if it were happening to a friend instead of you. How would you look at this situation if you were a little more removed? You were the outside looking in. For example, if you have one of your children asserting themselves, they disagree with you a lot, and they are not easy to deal with at this moment. When they are your child, and they are pushing your buttons, that can be tough to deal with. It is the same thing if it happens to be one of your team members.

However, if you are a little more objective and removed from the situation, and it is not happening to you, you could say in the case of a child or a teenager, “I’m glad he has such strong opinions because I know that will serve him well. If he is in a situation of peer pressure or he is trying to make a decision, he knows what he wants. That might be difficult for me to deal with now. Overall, my goal is for my child to know what to do and what is important to him.” That is one way you could reframe it. You could objectively feel a little better.

If it was a team member, it would be a slightly different reframe because you would be asking yourself, “What is it that they are trying to tell me? What is it that they are frustrated about? What is the root of the issue?” Not that you wouldn’t be thinking about this with your child, but sometimes it is a little more difficult the closer someone is to you.

Reframing can be a fantastic way of getting yourself to a less emotional point, or if you have heard me talk about our oven and how when we are stressed, we turn that oven up to 500 degrees. This will bring it back down to 300. You can reasonably face whatever the situation is and deal with it. Sometimes reframing feels too far. You are upset and worked up about it.

 

This is where the other technique I have developed comes in, and I call it bicycling. The reason I call it bicycling is that when you are trying to change the way you think or feel about something, you can’t say, “I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want to be mad. I don’t want this experience to go this way,” for a couple of reasons. One, your subconscious mind doesn’t hear a negative. If you say, “Don’t trip,” you might notice that you trip. It is because the way your mind functions only hears that repeated command to trip. You can’t focus on something in the negative to prevent it from happening.

I call it bicycling because I envision riding a bicycle toward a wall and don’t want to hit it. The wall itself is whatever it is that you are dealing with that you are trying not to have a big reaction to. As I’m riding this bicycle, it does not have brakes. If you were going towards a wall and didn’t have brakes, what would you do to prevent yourself from hitting it? You would turn your bike in a different direction. Depending on what speed you were going at, you would slow down and turn, or you would try and turn right away. You would switch the bike’s focus. By doing that, you would prevent yourself from hitting that wall. You want to find a way to do it safely and gently so that the bike doesn’t fall over to the side.

It is the same thing with your thoughts. If you have something bothering you, in this case, let’s go back to that bill, and you can’t reframe it necessarily, but you want to get into a better place with it. To bicycle away from that bill thought, I would start to focus on things that took my thoughts away from that bill. It would be things like, “It is not due until 3 or 4 weeks from now. I have plenty of time to earn more money to pay for it.” Maybe that doesn’t feel better. No problem.

You start thinking, “I am glad the bill charging me is taken care of. That is a relief. All we have to figure out is how to pay for it.” Maybe it is something you have plenty of money for. You are just irritated by it. Your bicycle-type thought is, “It is annoying to get a bill like this, but I am fortunate that it is annoying, but I can afford to pay it.” Whatever thought steers you away and makes you feel better about that situation.

What you are doing is you are teaching yourself to focus on something else. You get yourself feeling a little better, and you change the subject. Think about other things. Think about the coffee you have coming up with your friend. Think about the thing you are doing at work you are enjoying or the new hobby you have. Once you get yourself neutral on that particular thought, you don’t have to get to where you feel great about it. Get to where you are neutral. You didn’t hit that wall. You can start focusing on things that put you in a better mindset.

Start focusing on things that put you in a better mindset. Share on X

If neither of these two work and this happens, I’m going to give you my third technique. You are like, “April, she is not getting it. She is on the struggle bus. I don’t even know what to do about this technique.” It is simple that you might laugh. You might think, “There is no way that works,” and it 100% works. If I can’t get anywhere with these tools, I take a short nap. It could be 10 or 20 minutes. Some people like to meditate. It doesn’t matter. This is something you could do in your cubicle, car, office, and at home. If you are a remote worker, take 10 or 20 minutes and go to sleep.

The reason is it resets you. There is a situation where I go and take a short nap. When I wake up, I don’t feel differently because it is hitting the reset button. If you ever had anything that was having technical issues, and if you are not a technical person or an IT person, you unplug it and plug it back in. It magically fixes things 80% or 90% of the time. This nap is the same way.

 

A recap of those three techniques. You have your reframing, which we practice every week, and you are getting good at it now. We have lots of episodes on that. You have this new bicycling technique, which can help you when it is harder to move away from that thought. Third, if you have to, take that nap. I want you to start trying out these techniques and see how they help with your mindset. I would love to hear about it. You can reach out to me through the website WinningMindsetMasteryPodcast.com. All the way down at the bottom is a button where you can leave me a personal message. It is private. I will answer you right back. Here is to your success.