One Surefire Way to Overcome Setbacks
A simple hack to guide our inner monologue toward positive action when faced with setbacks
Several days ago, I came across an article [1] about a positive attitude of seeing difficulties as opportunities that brought back some memories of a slightly different version. I originally learned it when I was in graduate school, where it was a habit of one of my professors. Whenever I went to him complaining about something not working out, his first response would be “That’s good …” followed by a reason. For some reason, it stuck with me because it was a difficult situation where the only option was to keep moving forward, and this attitude kept me motivated despite setbacks. Eventually, I extended this initial version of this self-talk hack to make it more effective.
How to influencing our inner monologue
It is natural to get discouraged and frustrated when things don’t go in our favor. Consequently, our self-talk becomes pessimistic, hence rationalizing us to give up. On the contrary …
Optimism is a one-way street: the only option is to keep moving forward.
The situation demands we focus on what we can control and take constructive action. To keep going, I found that we can inject the following phrase into our self-talk to push our minds toward the positive.
That is good because it is an opportunity to …
I have found that injecting this phrase deliberately into my self-monologue causes it to automatically come up with reasons for seeing opportunities in the situation. In this article, I will analyze how this works. The trick here is to leverage the positive reactions ingrained in our minds when we hear words like good and opportunity. Moreover, it is a short enough phrase to remember and use whenever needed.
1] That is good …
Telling this to ourselves in response to “I don’t like the way things are going” takes advantage of our existing reaction when describing something we feel good about. Deliberately saying this about the situation will quickly trigger us to feel good about it. Having said that, this incites a question from our sub-conscience: why is this situation good? This is where the next part comes into the picture.
2] … because …
This tells our sub-conscience that the reason why this situation is good is coming up next. Making un-substantiated statements naturally creates doubts like a knee-jerk reaction. In some situations, we may ignore the doubts, but an unaddressed doubt may haunt us, especially when the going gets tough. Therefore, we must connect the above assertion with a supporting reason.
3] … it is an opportunity to …
Finally, we cue our minds to come up with a reason to support the above statement. Here, the word opportunity causes us to change our perspective about the situation, and our sub-conscience automatically comes up with actual reasons for why it is an opportunity. The positivity of the word opportunity, which is already deeply ingrained in our minds through the context in which it appears daily, causes us to switch out of regret or frustration and think about leveraging what is in our control to make progress.
Final Thoughts
Just like our emotional state influences our language, we can change our default state by introducing positive language into our inner monologue. The phrase presented here cues our mind to generate a supporting answer toward making progress.
References
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