To see a bright side, you have to choose it.
It’s hard to stay focused on work. It’s hard to be positive. It’s hard to be a catalyst or a change maker. It’s hard to stay in it.
Life is hard. I find myself talking to people over and over again about just how hard life, and life and work, are. We are inundated with messages, news stories, and realities that make things even harder. When we think about how broken the world feels, how overwhelming the modern day news feels, combined with how easy it is to get caught up in all of it, we are fooling ourselves if we don’t expect these feelings to come to work with us and everyone else.
We’re not just feeling hopeless, we’re also feeling angry and frustrated, and many of us are deeply concerned about the state of world, the state of the political climate, our future, and our economic situation. Things are chaotic right now. They feel out of control. And each one of us probably struggles with our own inability to do anything about it.
We can’t deny this happens, but what can we do about it?
An American psychologist, Albert Ellis, developed a way of taking care of your emotional self called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). According to REBT, it is largely how we think about events that leads to emotional and behavioral upset.
One of the ideas he pioneered within REBT is the ABC concept. “A” represents the activating events — the thing that happens and causes you to feel or react in a particular way. This could be a political situation, an exchange you had with someone at work, or just a thought inside your own head. “B” represents what we believe about the activating event. So if the activating event was a conversation you had, your belief might be that you sounded dumb when you asked that one question. And “C” represents the actual consequences that will come about due to the activating event.
The Bs are a really rich part of this model. Our beliefs around events or situations are an amalgam of explicit and implicit philosophical meanings, assumptions about people or events, our own personal desires and insecurities, and any and all preferences or biases we have. That’s a lot of stuff that isn’t easy to unpack or understand. According to REBT, if a person’s set of beliefs about an activating event are rigid, absolutistic, fictional and dysfunctional, the emotional and behavioral consequence is likely to be self-defeating and destructive. Alternatively, if a person’s belief is preferential, flexible, and constructive, the emotional and behavioral consequence is likely to be self-helping and constructive.
It’s in believing that we understand the activating event and in then predicting consequences based on that often-times irrational understanding of the event that creates the overwhelm. If this, then that. For sure. Without stopping to piece apart all the beliefs feeding that cycle.
That’s where it’s important to understand the value of self-talk. Now, I’m no therapist, but in the tough love I deliver and in the talks that I do, I find myself reminding people that we all have little demons inside our heads that feed us commentary. They remind us about our incompetencies or our shortcomings, and feed us a steady stream of all the possible negative outcomes of any given situation. It’s self-talk. It’s the conversation we let happen in our subconscious that creates our anxiety. And believe it or not, you have control over that conversation.
Regaining Control
When things get tough and we bring it to work or we have a hard time focusing, or we’re wearing our stress like a suit, what do we do? We have to take care of ourselves. And it starts with adjusting our self-talk. We can believe that things will turn our horribly or we can believe that they will be fine. We can believe that we’re doomed or we can believe that we will be able to take care of our families, that we have a plan, and that we’re in control. “One of the main objectives in REBT is to show that whenever unpleasant and unfortunate activating events occur in people’s lives, they have a choice of making themselves feel healthily and self-helpingly sorry, disappointed, frustrated, and annoyed, or making themselves feel unhealthily and self-defeatingly horrified, terrified, panicked, depressed, self-hating and self-pitying. By attaining and ingraining a more rational and self-constructive philosophy of themselves, others and the world, people often are more likely to behave and emote in more life-serving and adaptive ways.” Be upset, but don’t panic. Feeling things is good, but letting those feelings overtake everything else is not.
Then we have to cultivate control with self-care. Focus on priorities: family, health, recreational time. Create the head space to be able to believe appropriately. Maybe it’s yoga, walking, going to see shows, or connecting with your community. Focus on what you can do. Surround yourself with people who want to feel powerful, not victimized. Maybe that includes volunteering or becoming a member of a movement instead of being a spectator. Whatever it looks like for you, self-care is a critical component of changing your “Bs” — your beliefs — about the outcomes, the consequences.
Humans are weird. When we’re feeling down or victimized, we often make ourselves feel worse by perpetuating negative thinking. In fact, our default is to be negative. It’s easier. It’s easier to point out things that are broken or wrong. It’s harder to look at things and say, “I have control over this. I can make a tiny change that will make the outcome of this situation feel different.” It is hard to say, “I am going to be proactive instead of reactive.” It’s hard to come to work each day saying, “I am going to be a positive voice in a meeting. I am going to go the extra mile to make things easier on my colleagues.” But you can do that. You can show up smiling, and ask people how they’re doing and really listen to them. You can be engaged with your work, with your community, with the people around you. And self-care is how we get there.
There are so many ways you can contribute to the health and wellbeing of the people around you, and they aren’t huge things. Many are simple. But we forget that because we get caught up in the overwhelm. We forget that a smile can change the energy in a room. We forget that caring about people doesn’t have to be a distraction.
Times are tough right now. It’s just not reasonable that we actually expect people to leave their emotions at home when they come to work. Emotions are part of the whole talent package. And, let’s be honest, if you think about history, there hasn’t really been a time when people didn’t have big concerns. There isn’t a moment in history that hasn’t been scary for one reason or another. We live in hopeful times — it’s up to us to maintain that hope and to fuel that hope for us and everyone around us. If our “B” has us defeated then that is what will happen. But if we are mindful and aware of what we can do to change energy, and put forth effort, we can change how things feel, a little bit at a time.
We can be rigid and self-defeating, or we can be flexible and constructive. What do you want to be?
(This is an essay about how to maybe see work, and your emotions at work, differently. This is not an essay about ‘mental health’ in the absolute sense or depression.)
