Frustrated? Try This
Your Go-To Strategy to Change Your Outlook
By last Friday, I’d had it up to here — I was annoyed and frustrated with a couple of colleagues, and I had been stonewalled by another. As an instructional coach, it’s par for the course: when you have a job where it is your job to push on people, inevitably, someone’s going to push back — hard. But I was frustrated, nonetheless. I’m human, too, and I have feelings.
The first coping method that sprang forward was sarcasm. Every word that came out of my mouth and every thought that entered my mind was singed with it. Next came anger, and then bitterness.
And then, as I listened to myself complain and whine to a co-worker, I checked myself. Whoa, I thought. Wait a second. Calm down. I reflected on the events of the day, taking a break to sift through my thoughts like loose papers on a messy desk, sorting through them to try to make sense of why I was feeling this way.
You’re never to old to give yourself a time-out when you find yourself spiraling.
The first event I examined: Early in the morning, as I was starting my day, I found out that a teacher chat group existed that I hadn’t been invited to. And what made it worse? It had been around for two years. That stung, I thought. And then from a place of hurt, I wondered: Why had they excluded me? I took a deep…
