I got a work-related email Thursday that made my stomach churn. It was from a client asking me about an issue I’d managed to avoid to avoid talking with him about. I knew he wouldn’t be happy with a decision I’d made related to his account — and I dreaded the day when I would have to deal with it. That day had come.
For a few minutes, I stewed in my unhappiness. I worried about how I was going to handle it. And then something finally clicked in my brain. I forced myself to ask the question I needed to ask.
“What is it that I need to learn from this?”
It sounds ridiculously naive, but for the last few years, that one question has saved me from a lot of grief. It doesn’t protect me from my own mistakes, but it puts me in the right frame of mind to deal with problems. But this isn’t some technique I learned from a book.
It’s something I learned from the experience of a woman who says she died briefly and visited heaven. It might sound crazy, but it’s been useful for me.
After 50 years of being alone and disappointed, boy finally gets girl
It’s hard to nurture what’s alive when you water dead flowers
We often live in the tension between known and unknown
Lesson from U2: Rejection doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to give up
There’s hatred, evil and injustice, but this is the ‘real’ America, too
Friday’s article will be delayed
Life is too short to hide the love you would regret hiding at death
Kids obeyed me on radio project, only because I knew what to do
As my path keeps changing, I can now admit my plans are useless