Facing frustratiom and disappointment

Kim Jong In and Donald Trump did their best to set aside 60 years of dark history and distrust as well as their own jabs at each other. They shared a smile and a lingering handshake before their nations’ flags and the anxious eyes of the world.

Every day there are plenty of good reasons to be vexed. A long queue. Telemarketers. People don't do what they're supposed to do. Rejection. Disappointment. How to deal with it all?

At our own risk, we've become too used to immediate results. Emails zip across the globe in seconds. Parents text their kids about dinner. You can get the temperature in London with a click of the mouse. These digital age's marvels has propagated an emotional zeitgeist with a low tolerance for frustration.

Sooner or later, in business or the most loving relationships, you'll get disappointed, and you'll disappoint others. There will always be disappointments; mindfully dealing with them is what counts.

Frustration makes us tense and kills ours sense of humour. Disappointment is a form of frustration that occurs when our expectations are dashed. Conquering frustration and dealing with disappointment are skills I'm trying to learn so I can quickly bounce back.

I'm fed up with letting frustrations get the best of me. Nowadays, I constantly give myself pep talks: "I'm going to behave in a new way because the old way isn't working." When something aggravates me, the old way is to brood on it, which can taint an otherwise lovely day. The new way is to tackle the incident for instance, if I get a flat tire which cause me to miss an important meeting, I feel the frustration and express it to a friend. But I cut it short by not staying focused on it. Now, I try to focus on the positive. In any situation, there's always something positive if you look for it. I try not to turn a frustrating ten minutes into a frustrating day.

Next time, when someone says they can't see any good in you, just hug them. Because life can be very difficult for the blind.

If you're going through hell, keep going

Even those at the top can know the lows of depression. This was evident from the recent deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain - sudden suicide by people who seemingly have it all.

Life is difficult. There's just no getting around that fact.

Sure, life is more difficult for some people than others - but no matter how hard we try or how privileged we are, it is not possible to lead a life free from discomfort and difficulty.

We are living in an age of anxiety and when we feel stressed out (or sad or disappointed or bored or frustrated), our world offers up a host of ways to numb the pain. Alcohol, drugs, we overeat; we go shopping for things we don't need; we keep ourselves too busy to feel anything; compulsively checking our phones and email and facebook.

The moments in my life when things seemed the bleakest have also been when I found my greatest successes. As I look back at my life so far, I see that the darkest moments were immediately followed by spectacular illuminations.

Now that I'm older, I understand that when things get difficult and challenging, when you're in crisis mode and nothing seems to be going right, what really makes a difference is not that you just don't quit. You use it to leap forward. It's not about clawing yourself back to where you were before; it's about charging into a whole new space.

I prayed a lot. I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes. But pray I did, as fervently as I can remember ever doing. 

It's up to us to make the choice to be grateful even when things aren't going well. To me, it means not just being grateful for the good things, because that's easy, but also be grateful for the hard things too.

I read somewhere that the root cause of upset is unmet expectations. In any area of your life in which things aren't going as well as they should, your pain, anguish, disappointment (or whatever your thing is) is greater where the gap is widest between what you expected and what you actually have. It is harder in practise than in writing - I know it personally - instead of getting my knickers in a twist about how things didn't turn out the way I wanted or expected them to, I try to accept them for what they are.

Do it when a new job is going to take some getting used to, whether it's the tasks you're performing or the people you work with. If your relationship is struggling, change your perspective and get the whole picture. Many of us expect our partners to be a certain way consistently. But your partner, like you, is an imperfect human with his/her own set of complicated emotions and thoughts. So it's appropriate that they may sometimes be distracted or get short with you after a bad day.

Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if only one remembers to turn on the light. Only when it is dark, can we see the stars. Love the life you have, not the one you expected to have.

Adding too much value. Don't.

"Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” Trump got historical with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. That was an apparent reference to the War of 1812. Canada did not become a nation until 1867. That was the prelude to the most acrimonious world summit in years - the G7 which began in Quebec yesterday. Trump continues to play a poker game with international relations. 

There's a fine line between being competitive and over-competitive. Between winning when it counts and when no one's counting.

If the need to win is the overwhelming reason we're successful - then winning too much is a perverse genetic mutation that can limit our success.

We need to win people's admiration. We need to let them know that we are at least their intellectual equal if not their superior. We need to be the smartest person in the room. It usually backfires.

Many of us do this unwittingly all day long. If we are always expressing our opinion, no matter how hurtful or non contributory it may be, we are having an excessive need to be "me."

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we have to zip our lips. But the higher we go in the organization, the more we need to make other people winners and not make it about winning ourselves.

You have the right to remain silent. Exercise it sometimes. Keep this in mind, It's not about you. It's about what people think of you. 

We cannot resist change - successfully

Harry and divorcee Meghan's wedding is proof the royals are changing, TIME reported. Much has changed since last time an American divorcee married into the family when Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry Mrs Simpson in 1937 and the 1950s when the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret was forced to choose duty over love and declined the marriage proposal of divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend.

Mistakes are part of life, but intelligence means not repeating the same mistakes over and over - while expecting different results.

Most couples who stay together for more than ten years would probably agree that a relationship is a humbling school of self-knowledge, whose lessons reappear until we learn them. We also discover that long-term relationships provides constant demand to grow up or get out.

Successful relationships are built with the bricks of friendship, communication, honesty, loyalty and on occasion, putting our partner's needs and wishes before our own. If we continuously struggle to improve our partner ("if only s/he would stop doing X or start doing more Y") - that relationship becomes war.

We can only control our own behaviour, maybe a successful relationship comes down to the capacity to put up with each other. It's all part of the dance.

Few of us consciously intend to undermine our relationships or careers. Yet we remain unaware that lessons reappear until we learn them. The more we learn, the more adaptable we become and the fewer mistakes we repeat. 

Learning requires change; change requires losing face. Nothing really changes until we do. 
Charles Darwin explained what happens to animal species that fail to adapt to changing circumstances. They cease to be.