We’ve already looked at the relationship trouble that comes to people who live their lives reacting emotionally to the behavior of other people. These people truly are miserable. They react all day long. They wake up in the morning and begin their day reacting to all the bad news on the radio or on the television, all the crime, all the injustice, all the evidence that they can’t trust people.
Then they react to other people in traffic, flipping people off, getting flipped off, honking as they weave their way to work. Then at the job, the reacting continues. A harsh word, an implied reprimand, a cold e-mail from management, and blood pressure goes up, breath becomes short, the throat constricts, and there is an unpleasant fluttering in the stomach.
Soon the heart races and headaches from behind the eyes, all in the name of reacting. This is the toll taken by the daily habit of reacting. No wonder we end up resenting other people, no wonder we can’t trust anyone. We hold them responsible for all these unpleasant bodily feelings.
What lifts us up when we’re in the depths of reacting is a gentle shift; not a huge change, not a transformation, but a shift. Just like the gentle shift of gears in a finely tuned car. We shift up from reacting to creating. One sure way to shift is to ask ourselves a simple question.
It’s a question first asked by Ralph Waldo Emerson many years ago: “Why should my happiness depend on the thoughts in someone else’s head?”
This question, no matter how we answer it in any given moment, gives us the mental perspective we need to start seeing the possibilities for shifting. As soon as we begin asking ourselves this question, we’re on the right path, because we are leaving the low life of deep negative emotions behind. We’re rising up.
~an excerpt from #11 of Steve Chandler’s 50 Ways to Create Great Relationships.
As Leaders we are working to help Make “Shift” Happen
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