Lessons and Plans

Often, my day starts going down hill when I encounter a difficulty that I can't immediately do anything to remedy.  Maybe I've got a food stain on my shirt halfway through the work day or I've discovered that I don't have all the ingredients to make the dinner that needs to be on the table in 30 minutes.  

At times like these, it's easy for a feeling of powerlessness to loom like a black cloud over everything you attempt, but here's a great way to turn these evil things for good.

Even if you can't do anything about the current bad situation, you can still look for the lesson that the situation can teach you, and then you can make plans for the future.  For example, I might decide that I need to keep a spare blouse in my office or that I should develop the habit of gathering all of the ingredients for my recipe before I begin to cook.  

Once you've found your lesson and used it to make plans to avoid the same aggravations in the future, you can feel your power and your good mood coming back.  If there's any small step you can take right now to move in a better direction, even better.  For example, I might put a sticky note on my briefcase to remind myself about the extra blouse.  Taking *some kind of action*, no matter how small, forces your mind to focus on what you can control (i.e., the future) instead of what you can't (i.e., the present), and this can give you the energy you need to bust that bad day wide open.