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Keep life in perspective mates:

•     At age four success is not peeing in your pants
•     At age twelve success is having friends
•     At age sixteen success is having a drivers license
•     At age twenty success is having sex
•     At age thirty five success is a corner office and money
•     At age fifty success is having more money
•     At age sixty success is having sex with or without the aid of a pill
•     At age seventy success is being able to find your driver’s license
•     At age eighty success is having friends and remembering their names
•     At age ninety success is not caring where you’ve peed, as long as it still works…most of the time

 

I’ll bet everyone knows someone that just gives off that “vibe” – you know the one, all perpetual doom and gloom. When you first meet them you do your best to try and lift their spirits.

Over time it becomes obvious to even you, they are right, they are doomed.. At least as far as their lives are concerned, these people are just unlucky! If there’s a bug going around they are going to catch it, twice.

If a tornado touches down somewhere, even if this person had no reason to be within fifty miles of the destruction zone, they somehow managed to be caught up right in it. It’s never bad enough to finish them off. It’s always just bad enough for you to get to hear about, at least until their next disastrous encounter.

These people literally seem to vibrate at the exact right frequency to constantly self-fulfill their own negative prophesies.  Eventually you start to wonder whether you should be within fifty miles of them because they really do attract problems!

I had friend like this while I was in the service. This guy was so bad he was once taken over by a poltergeist. Fortunately for him, the spirit left him after a couple of days because it was just too sad, lonely, and depressing inside his body…

 

Over the last few days we have talked about different scenarios in regards to what constitutes a bad day, how others may view a bad day of their own in comparison to yours, and whether optimists and pessimists fair best in the worst of circumstances – confinement in a POW camp.

We have been looking at this to see if we can uncover a way for us to improve our own emotional stability, and subsequently not let frustrating negative days get us down.

 

Contrary counterfactual thinking is one of my favorites to battle this phenomenon.

 

I remember a particularly harsh few days during Commando training, when, to be honest, I was ready to quit. We’d been beasted (harassed) for days, had little or no sleep, less food, and marched until I could sleep standing up.

The rain was pouring, I was freezing, two members of my four man team had lay down and stopped doing what it was they were supposed to be doing, and I was basically fed up.

The training team was camped out at the top of a small hill, drinking tea and eating bacon sandwiches – which, by-the-way, I could smell easily with the wind blowing the scent back to where I stood, less than a mile from them, dejectedly slumped over my entrenching tool.

The one guy on my team who didn’t seem to be fazed by anything, ever, was a short assed Yorkshire man who seemed impervious to any of it. He was making up for the lack of work the rest of us seemed to be incapable of doing, and performing with minimal complaints.

At that moment I hated him.

I hated the other two guys as well, because they weren’t even trying. At least I was standing up and quitting. They were asleep.

My Yorkshire friend said,

“Come on Terry. Let’s get this finished so we can grab a few hours shut eye, too.”

I must have looked at him as if he was crazy because I knew there wasn’t a hope in hell we could accomplish the task set us, with only two of us doing the work of four.

Actually at this time it was one doing the work of four because I might have been standing up, but I was about as much use as a chocolate fireguard….

Still, in my capacity as a man at least still on his feet, I felt I had some solid ground from which to start throwing my little temper tantrum.

I explained in not so many words that I was done with this crap. (I’m leaving out much of what I said as my language at the time could have made a drunken sailor blush).

The only thing from stopping me from going up to the training teams’ tent and quitting was the hill. I think I was too tired to walk up it. Pathetic I know.

Somewhere in the soft part of my brain where manliness and pride was supposed to reside, I heard only quiet whimpering and a desperate need to eat a bacon sandwich.

The Yorkshire man listened empathetically to my whining, as if he wasn’t actually going through the same thing as me, just with less drama, before beginning his pep talk. It went something like this,

“I know you’re tired Terry, me too. And we’re both freezing cold and wet. I know you can smell the food cooking and want something to eat, ‘cause I do too.

I know any minute now the training team are going to come back down here, tell us we’ve got it all wrong, and tell us to start again, and we’ll probably dig for another twelve hours.

But you know what. They can beast us, starve us, scream at us, beat us, punish us, and abuse us – but you know what?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know after he said all that. But I kept quiet to listen to what this tough little bugger had to say that kept him going when everyone else had quit.

“But, no matter what happens mate, no matter how bad it gets, they can’t get us pregnant…”

 

Now maybe it was because I was so tired. Maybe it was because he immediately went back to digging, again. Or maybe it was the fact that he found his own joke so funny. But whatever the reason, I laughed – long and hard.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the most concise example of contrary counterfactual thinking I’d ever heard. I went back to digging. We dug for a total of 37 hours, nonstop.

It rained the whole time. We failed every inspection. We ate boiled sweets only.

Every time the training team left us after chewing us out even more than the last time, he’d look at me and start smiling and we’d go back to it.

I never considered quitting training again. Every time it got tough, messy, or just plain unsocial, I’d remember what he’d said, I’d start to smile and then get back to work.

 

The guys we talked about yesterday, the ones that survived some of the most barbaric and inhumane treatment possible, did so not by being optimists, neither did they achieve it by being pessimists; they did it by being something in the middle.

They lived as much in the moment as they could

They measured victories in minor achievements – no matter how small

They did something every day to try and improve their lives and the lives of the men around them

They had little or no resources, so they became so resourceful they even extracted thiamin from rice polishings using battery acid

They focused much of their attention on alternative medical practices, starting with attitude

A good positive attitude meant the individual would make themselves get up and exercise – even if that was only walking a hundred yards each day

They lived to spite their captors – intense hatred existed for obvious reasons between captors and captives, they used this to fuel their will to live

 

The list of skills these men mastered in order to survive is both extensive and awe inspiring. As I said before, sometimes it takes reading about someone that has overcome such calamities, to highlight what really constitutes a bad day.

The comparison puts our own issues into proper perspective.

 

So here is my list of things, in order of importance, which I think you need to help stop yourself spiraling out of control emotionally, and losing sight of the big picture:

A good healthy positive attitude – bad things happen, not because it’s you, but because that’s life. No matter how bad they get, they can always be worse! Imagine a worse scenario than the one you face, and you’ll be facing down your current predicament with an upbeat attitude in no time.

If in doubt, crack a joke – nothing relieves the tension like making fun of yourself, or your predicament. Peter Ustinov said it best, “It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.”

Be resourceful – it’s not about what you don’t have at hand, it’s about using what you do have in ways you’ve never considered before.

Set long term goals by all means – just remember this, today is the most important day in your journey towards that goal.

Succeed to spite someone you hate – just like our prisoners of war, sometimes you can move mountains in order to survive or prove someone wrong. And sometimes, it’s just to be able to say, “I succeeded just to piss you off!”

 Cheers, Terry

http://www.highintensityteambuilding.com

 

P.S. “Nothing in life is so exhillarating as to be shot at without result.” - Winston Churchill