The older I become, the more I feel that taking advantage of the power of your mind is the key to more sustainable wellbeing and happiness.
My husband called from the island in the middle of the night about a week ago. He told me that there’s a hole in the bottom of our boat home. I instantly yelled NO!!
For a minute or two I was totally shocked but quite fast I managed to calm down.
These 3 steps that I’ve learned over the past few years made it possible.
1. Put your setback into PERSPECTIVE
It’s just a boat. No one got hurt. This is small compared to some of our crisis. We managed to deal with those so why not this?
Even the smallest setbacks in life may grow big. Keeping things in perspective helps you not to get stuck and even see the silver lining.
2. ACCEPT that setbacks just happen, no matter what
OK, there´s water in our home. It´s annoying but it cannot be undone. It´s wiser to concentrate just on adapting.
Setbacks take time and energy but we can influence how much.
We can practice how our mind reacts by learning acceptance. The better we’re at it, the easier it becomes to cope with life’s ups and downs.
3. Start to ACT as soon as possible
These things happen to old boats. Something always comes up. But what can we do to fix it?
Setbacks cause negative emotions and that’s ok. You don’t need to ignore your feelings but you don’t need to dwell on them either.
The faster you start to act for putting your setback into perspective, accepting it and making an action plan to fix it, the faster you’re done with it.
So how is our boat home doing?
Now after one and a half week it’s fixed and waiting us to move in! Without our friends’ help it would have not been possible. Thank you so much!
And without those three steps above we would still be annoyed of all that extra work it caused. But now I’m able to say “Tailwinds, here we come!”
