The Most Important Strategy to Use When You Have the Day from Hell

I don’t care whether you are Tony Robbins or Richard Branson — you will have the day from hell at some point. It’s not whether you will have the day from hell but when. The question is, how will you show up when that day arrives?

What is your strategy for dealing with that day?

This quote below is the first step in solving the problem:

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.” — Carl Jung

Now I want you to read that quote three more times. Let the quote from renowned psychologist Carl Jung sink in. This quote is the answer to your bad day and it holds the wisdom which can solve more than a bad day. If there was one cheat to unlocking your potential, it would be this.

A bad day is a matter of perspective

That is what this quote tells us. The way you look at your day and label it in your mind determines what it is.

Mislabeling your day or intentionally seeing your day as one that was born in a place such as hell, causes many of the feelings, and worse, reactions that you are going to have from a bad day.

Replace the word bad with challenging and leave it at that for now.

The day is not bad. It just didn’t go the way you wanted it to go.

Life won’t go the way you want it to go most of the time, so you need to get used to it. If you want to wake up every day and have every answer to your requests in life be a yes, then you are living a nightmare that is worse than your roughest, toughest, craziest day in history.

Most of your days won’t turn out how you want them to and that’s the best part. You won’t know what will work out and what will fall into a huge mess.

If you knew everything that was going to happen, you’d either be a god of some sort or really bored when you wake up.

Things won’t go your way most of the time.

The brain has a few default responses.

When you have had the day from hell, if you have no strategy, don’t fear because your brain has many for you and they will destroy you if you let them take over.

Your brain will tell you on these so-called bad days the following:

• “You suck”
• “It won’t happen”
• “Give up”
• “I’m so frustrated right now”

Your brain should have been a harsh Navy Seal Trainer with such inspiring words of wisdom that could crush the dreams of even the bravest man or woman. These phrases are our natural state and only we can override them.

Each statement is a lie designed to explain the emptiness you feel on a day from hell when nothing makes sense.

Yesterday was a challenging day (see what I did there?) for me. I didn’t sleep at all the night before, I woke up with a headache, I had my goal for 2019 destroyed, and I felt a huge sense of frustration.

Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Trying to find any sense of optimism yesterday was near-impossible. No action, conversation or thought during this twenty-four hour period was going to be useful. So as crazy as it may sound, I decided not to do anything overly important.

I didn’t write a blog article; I didn’t call people to talk about my day; I didn’t try and solve any of the problems.

All I did was sit down and think to myself this:

“If I had to find one good thing from today, just one, what would it be?”

The result of this question is the same as the quote above: it depends on how you look at the day. This was part one, but what it led me to was something even bigger which will knock your socks off. Here it is below.

“It’s in these conditions that you can change.”

The point of my challenging day was that a change needed to occur. The problem with change is that it’s the easiest thing to mess up and it will almost certainly be postponed.

A regular day without any major problems is not the sort of environment where you can implement significant change.

If you are looking at your day all wrong, the willpower and perspective you need to move beyond that will not come to you in comfort.

In my case, it took a headache worse than any hangover I have ever encountered, a level of frustration that was bordering on brat-like behavior, and a giant goal of mine blowing up in my face.

This is the exact environment I’m talking about that produces the radical changes you need to reach the next level.

Your bad day is really a challenging day that will test you and see if you are ready for the next round of changes you need to make in your life.

In the conditions of a challenging day, you can experience wisdom and see yourself in a different light. How you show up on a challenging day will determine the good days and the rest of your life.

If you can deal with a challenging day and have it help you make the changes you’ve been putting off, you can do anything.

Worship your challenging day

So the next time one of these days occurs, it’s time to change how you see it and be thankful instead.

Worship the headache. Worship the frustration. Worship being pissed off.

Now you’re ready to change and that is a gift more valuable than a cheque for $10,000,000. It’s all a matter of perspective.

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