The natural course of life is that, sometimes, things don’t go the way we would prefer. A situation doesn’t turn out as you planned. A relationship might not deepen and grow like you anticipated.
But you can determine how you’ll react when things don’t progress as you expected them to. And how you react can either keep you stuck in a negative situation or enable you to move forward with positivity and optimism.
Try these tips for approaching a situation that seems to have gone wrong:
1. Face it. Acknowledge the facts to yourself. Recognize that the situation has progressed along a negative path.
2. Contemplate it. Reflect on what happened. What was your first clue that things were going in a different direction than you expected?
3. Recognize that everyone has tough times. You don’t have to feel like the Lone Ranger. Everyone you know has experienced challenging events in their lives. Probably someone you know is struggling right now with an issue that you might not be aware of.
4. Consider your role. What was your part in events going the way they did? Could you have stopped the situation from occurring? Did you feel intuitively that it would happen?
- If you need to make an apology or talk with someone about an error you made, do so right away. This way, you’re owning up to and correcting the parts of the situation that you had a hand in. You’ll learn important information for future similar situations and move past the current event with grace and ease.
5. Tell yourself you’ll get through it. Recognize that you’ve survived challenging events before. You can really boost your self-esteem by knowing that you’ll eventually get through a situation and will be okay on the other side.
6. Remember how you navigated prior negative experiences. Exactly how did you get through the challenging situations in your past? Use those strategies again now to manage the current challenge.
7. Reconsider your goal. Is your objective still achievable now that the difficult situation has taken place? Do you even still want the same thing?
8. Establish a new objective if necessary. If the other goal is no longer achievable, where can you go from here? What’s the best thing you can work toward now? Maybe because of this situation, a possibility has opened that wasn’t there before. Once you determine your new goal, you have a direction, and that’s critical to your happiness and success.
9. Seek support. When something goes awry, turn to your close friends and family members for emotional support. Talk with them about the challenging situation. Lean on them a bit. After all, that’s what friends are for.
10. Shake it off. Going through the steps above can help you reach a point where you can let the disappointment go. Accept that it occurred and then keep on going. Shaking off the negative situation means you’re empowering yourself to get past this and continue on to a brighter future.
You can successfully rise above any situation gone awry. Apply these ten tips to get things going right again.
You’ll find resources within yourself that you may not have known existed. Get started today. You can do it!