I am loving this theme of ‘what I have learned this week’ and I had a great example of taking responsibility for my reactions.
I am one of those people who is a stickler for time management, I LOVE being on time and am very rarely late.
This week my husband and I were travelling to Champneys, Forest Mere Health Spa for a speaker date I regularly am invited to every month.
Its overnight and I really love the whole experience, my talk is at 6pm and I wanted to leave at the earliest time to get most out of the few days we where there.
9am was my cut off time and my husband’s time management is not quite as specific as mine is, the clock was ticking and I started to notice the anger building up when it was almost 9am and he was not ready, historically I would have started to complain and we would have ended up in a bit of a row.
THIS time, the learning for me was to notice the feelings and ask myself ‘is it worth the argument we might have? to be honest we rarely have arguments, its more of an open forum to discuss our feelings without the injection of huge outbursts.
I decided to take responsibility for my frustration and anger share it in a non-aggressive and non-judgmental way.
We ended up leaving at 9.20am and had an amazing time as a result of my taking control of my reaction.
I realise when we debriefed on the subject it’s a bit fear based and I just don’t want to miss out (bless me) we even had a laugh about it and feel closer as a couple understanding our little idiosyncrasies.
So next time you are feeling any strong emotion, STOP and nice it and follow it through to what the ending might be, you will be amazed if you take responsivity for your reactions how you can change a potentially explosive situation to a real positive one.