Have you seen my No Complaining Challenge yet?

Because many are calling 2020 a ‘bad’ year, this seemed like an ideal time to challenge my readers not to complain for the next three weeks.

Check it out!

In today’s post I want you to think about how you react to a stressful situation?

Do you get angry, upset… complain?

Do you often find when you’ve have a breather, you realise how inappropriate your impulse reaction was?

For the No Complaining Challenge this is a useful exercise to identify incidents that get you complaining, so you can put a plan in to avoid overreacting and keep control of your emotions in the future.

The key is to not react to your first instinct – recently I got pissed off with Amazon, as once again they tricked me into activating Amazon Prime Membership, a method I’m sure is pretty deliberate as they know many people will forget to cancel before their free 30 day trial expires.

This incident angered me and set me off complaining about what a bunch of greedy bastards they are, until 5 minutes later I cooled down and told myself I’d just cancel the membership (after I got my delivery of course).

Be aware how you to react to pressure when carrying out the challenge, as these can be a source to what triggers a lot of your complaints.

Breath, Recalibrate, Deliver

A strategy to take control of your emotions, is the breath, recalibrate, deliver method, which I learnt from the book SAS:Who Dares Wins.

This is worth keeping in mind if you are quick to jump to conclusions when something you don’t like happens.

Slow the situation you experience down so you aren’t quick to just blurt out the first thought in your head.

• Breath: take a pause, so you don’t lose control and overreact.
• Recalibrate: think through the options, reject the impulsive aggression.
• Deliver: carry out the reframed approach to completing the action.

Closing Thoughts…

The purpose of this method is to keep you cool in stressful situations – when you think about it, breath, recalibrate, deliver is such a simple method and yet many of us don’t naturally apply this approach.

I’m certain if we did there would be a lot less pointless arguments on the Internet – a medium that has the benefit of allowing us to pace our thoughts, which we choose to ignore anyway, preferring to angrily bang out words on a keyboard.

Next time you get angry about something or want to complain try it… see if it helps your reaction to stressful situations.

For more ideas on handling pressure then I recommend you check out my post Handling pressure: Lessons from the SAS for thoughts and strategies to manage these situations.

Have a great day!

<<Next post in the No Complaining Challenge 2020 Series 9 Tips to Manage Your Complaining>>

Take the No Complaining Challenge

This is part of a series of posts for the No Complaining Challenge 2020.

I challenge you to try not to complain for the next three weeks and see what happens.

Everytime you fail (and you will) make a note of what the trigger is and set a plan of action in place avoid falling into this trap.

When you do this you’re going to fail, fail, fail again.  But when you do, at least you know not to complain about it…

I’ll be providing posts for the three weeks to inspire you to a more positive life – make sure you don’t miss out and subscribe to Perfect Manifesto.

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