Picking Yourself up Again!

Despite our best efforts, sometimes life knocks us down. And this happens more often than not. We do our best. We plan. We set the goals. We put in the effort. We execute. We implement our plans. We put in the hours. Yet, the wind comes and blows it all away. It is hard dealing with such frustration and disappointment. It is difficult to deal with the reality of watching your life’s work dissipate before your eyes. It is hard seeing yourself lose everything that you have worked so hard to build. But that is life. A quote from a movie read “nobody said life’s gonna be fair.” Truly, it does appear sometimes that life is so unfair. It could be true that what happens to us sometimes is unfair. But the question here is not if life is unfair or why life has been unfair to us. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

We always have a choice. We can look at the situation and whine and wimp and feel sorry for ourselves. Of course we may be justified if we decide to toe that path. The path of self-indulgence and self-pity seem attractive. We may even attract the sympathy of family and friends. And then what? To what end? When the pity party is over, what is in it for you? While failure, defeat or a loss is hard to process, we need to be forward thinking and put things into perspective. Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, we may look at it differently and be biased towards a different set of actions. This is the place where positive thinking becomes useful and valuable. We may be down, but not out. We may be cast down, but not destroyed. So long as we still breathe, so long as our hearts keep pumping blood, we have a fighting chance.?

We can then have a prayer of a comeback. When we think along these lines, it gives us not only the courage, but also the energy to stage a comeback. Comebacks are exciting, they are invigorating. Instead of giving in to the forces that seek to hold us bound to the floor of life, we cut ourselves loose and spring back to doing the important albeit difficult work of reassessing, strategizing, and rebuilding our lives and our future. Even though life was never meant to be a struggle, no one said it was going to be easy. What creates this frustration when we hit a bump on the road or our work experiences a glitch is the mismatch between expectation and reality. We make grandiose plans and somehow expect that it will all go through. The problem comes when sometimes despite our best intentions and efforts, things fall through.

When we transcend from expecting everything to work out perfectly to knowing that sometimes things will not go according to plan, we develop a mindset shift and plan for our plan not going according to plan. I call this system of thinking “contingency thinking” or “scenario thinking.”. Thinking in contingencies means we already anticipate and accept in advance the possibility of our plans and projects faltering. When we do, we would have already come up with alternative ways of navigating those negative scenarios that may occur and tend to set us back. More importantly, we develop the mindset that whatever happens, we do not need to stay down and stay defeated. The right thing to do is to pick ourselves back up, and implement our alternative plan, and just keep on going. Down the road, we will find the success that we have always sought and worked hard for. It will take time, but we will get there!

Alex James

July 04, 2022