Hey guys!
I was inspired by this post about how tiny gains made a huge difference, and this is my way of making today 1% better than yesterday.
Here it is:
Whenever you feel anger/irritation/annoyance, pause and ask yourself, why are you feeling this way?
Some personal story behind this strategy I came up for myself to grow in self-awareness, which I hope will help you all as well.
I work as an Administrator and have been feeling rather irritated and annoyed whenever someone just comes up and throws a menial, monotonous task for me to do. It just comes. If the person is nicer, that feeling won't come up as much - but it will rear its ugly head when the person just talks down to me and expects me to do it immediately.
I'll lose my usual friendly agreeableness, tense up and go into a defensive mode. I'm a very emotional person, and feeling this surge of negative emotions puzzled me.
I realised, however, that I have nothing against the person. This irritation and annoyance is merely a trigger to something deeper, something underlying that just so happened to surface in such scenarios.
It's a sore spot. It's a trigger point: except now we are not dealing with muscle knots and mysofacial pain, but emotional knots and mental pain.
I finally came to the insight after some inner work that I've been feeling very sensitive about self-neglect, always focussing on other's needs but sidelining my own.
So, when I am in the midst of a particular work, and someone rudely interrupts me to complete some admin task for them, I feel like my needs and priorities must give way to theirs (something I have been trying to actively fight, not being a doormat for people to step all over and take advantage of etc). I feel unimportant and insignificant.
Knowing this settled my heart more, and gave me the needed clarity to resolve the matter both internally and externally.
So I'm truly thankful for the wisdom, and this little bit more of self-awareness. ❤
Does this tip work for you too? Try it and let me know how it went in the comments below!