#1077 Misery Loves Company

While misery may love company, the the company doesn't love misery. 

There are no neutral moments. When you enter a room, you're either giving or taking energy, and that energy may be good or bad.

Unless you're Streep or Brando, you're transmitting feelings even when you think you aren't.

Maybe you didn't complain out loud, but your body posture, color, breathing, and eye movements shouted your displeasure.

No one thought specifically about these parts of you, but they added up to cast a pall around you, not unlike the cloud around Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoon. It's that obvious.

So, what are you to do?

Something bad happened, and you're carrying it around with you. There are a few things you can do to reset. The first is to realize something happened. It didn't happen to you. It was an occurrence, and you interpreted it. In the simplest forms, it may be traffic; coffee spilled on a dress just before the big meeting, an insult overheard, or the appearance of someone you don't care for. It is an occurrence. That is all it is until you give it meaning. At that moment, you can decide to give it a different meaning. 

What happened already is that you already gave meaning to an occurrence, charged it with emotion, justified your interpretation, acted (slumped shoulders, dark face, shot darts at someone, mumbled a grumpy greeting: whatever), and got a result.

The result you got is people secretly wishing you hadn't shown up: Debbie Downer.

It's hard to reinterpret an occurrence, but it's not like un-ringing a bell. It is your interpretation, and you can reinterpret it.

The coffee spill can become a moment of levity and self-deprecating humor. Traffic can be a chance to listen to a podcast, an insult overheard is a great moment to shoot imaginary arrows of love and kindness at the misguided, miserable insulter, and so on. The trick is to recognize the interpretive moment just after the occurrence and refashion it to something more useful.

You got this! 

Own Your Sales Gene…