Personal Growth Planet Blog

It can start with a knick while shaving, coffee spilling on your clean clothes or someone cutting you off in traffic.

Your lousy, no-good day can seem like an unending, downward spiral of irritations, annoyances, bad news and maybe a crisis or two thrown in as well.

If you’re having that kind of day (week, month or lifetime) try this…

#1: Have a 3 minute “pity party.”

C’mon, you know you want to. When nothing is going right, many of us feel sorry for ourselves. Yes, embarrassing, but it’s actually a pretty normal reaction. The trick is not to get stuck in a “poor me” mindset because this won’t improve your day.

I don’t like to think of myself as a manipulative person. I don’t like to think about myself as driven by the desire to be rewarded for my “good” or benevolent acts.

But, when I’m really honest with myself, I can see this in there. Rarely is it conscious, yet, when I look at the range of what motivates and propels me to say and do the things I do… it’s there.

The craving for and expectation of a reward.

I didn’t plan on purchasing a brand new car at the start of this new year, but this is what has happened. I’m grateful for my well-being after a car wreck that totaled my old car and also for the ability to purchase a new car.

You may have never owned a brand new car, but perhaps you’ve ridden in one. You know that smell? It’s a sort of rubber-fabric-plastic smell that you encounter in a new car (possibly due to some hideous chemicals that, frankly, I don’t want to think about).