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 highlight some tips to manage your complaining, this will help you think about how you approach and react to day-to-day life:

Look at the positives or opportunities in any situation

Whenever an event occurs, try and identify opportunities from it rather than highlight the limitations.

As the saying goes:

“If you’ve got nothing nice to say…”

Avoid moaners

There are some things you can guarantee in life – the season changes, the sun rising, and you’ll always meet someone who complains about anything.

When one person complains, two people suffer, then try your best to avoid them as whenever you see the positive in a situation, they will bring you down.

Challenge moaners

If you can’t avoid moaners because you need to interact with them in your day to day life, it’s always fun to challenge them.

Once, I worked with someone who complained about everything.  Everyone was sick of it.

One day she was complaining that she would be spending Christmas alone, so I decide to call her out, I invited her to come round mine for Christmas dinner.

She soon went quiet.

Honestly, I prefer to avoid confronting professional complainers as they are skilled in always making an excuse why your pragmatic approach isn’t correct.

Practice gratitude

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough, and more.”

Things that bother you don’t seem so bad when you practice gratitude.

You realise how much you have and how many others are in a much worse position – when coronavirus lockdown occurred, whenever thoughts of inconvenience to my day occurred I just thought of people who had died of the disease.

My post What Are You Grateful For?  Gives you some idea on how to practice this thinking.

Don’t react on impulse to stress

Quick question:

Will the things troubling you today matter in a years’ time?

Too often we let small irrelevant things bother us – taking time to put things into perspective are useful to avoid complaining and do wonders for your wellbeing.

My post How Do You React to Stressful Situations?  Talks about the Breath, Recalibrate, Deliver – an approach to help you manage a stressful situation.

Be self-aware

The best trick to stop complaining, is to be aware when you are grumbling about something and resist the urge to continue.

As you do this more and more, you will become more self-aware how much you actually complain and make positive efforts to cut-down/stop.

Be accountable

Be totally honest when you complain.

Whenever you set yourself a challenge, it’s always tempting to bend the truth with how successful you’ve been.

You might make excuses why you complained or justify an incident that set you ranting wasn’t complaining at all.

Stop this – make a note of it and set plans to address.

Reflect and Learn

When breaking down into complaining.  Think

• What set me off?
• What can I do differently?

Keep thinking about what your weaknesses are and apply some of the ideas presented in the No Complaining Challenge to help reprogram your attitudes.

Forgive yourself

By issuing this challenge, I want you to think about how much you complain during the day.

Realistically, I don’t expect anyone to be some stoic master – the purpose of this exercise is to help you understand how you react to situations and make efforts to change.

If at any time you put yourself down with negative self-talk, this isn’t good.

As you go about trying to be more positive, if you complain forgive yourself, reflect what went wrong and start again.

You’re doing good.

<<Next post in the No Complaining Challenge 2020 Series The No Complaining Challenge 2020: A Retrospective>>

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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Over the next three weeks I will be sharing content to inspire you to be more positive in your approach to life – if you join my newsletter we can keep in touch and you’ll receive more great content about being a father, taking care of your health and striving for life long self-improvement: