to wear were all clean, the sun shone, you caught your bus and got to work exactly on time and decided that this was going to be a great day. In this case you would have ignored the office cross-patch [deletion] and enjoyed the humour of the new junior. You would have focused on all the things that went right [deletion of the problems] and been sufficiently relaxed that when the boss complained of errors in your work you showed your concern for the extra pressure he was under to make him so touchy [a distortion in your favour].
Coming home you could have described the pleasant day you’d had and anticipated the chat you would have with the neighbour who had asked you to drop in, not realizing that she felt guilty for not including you in her recent dinner party [a distortion, again in your favour].
The person having the bad day would have been aware of all the problems in the office of the second, happy, person and the second person would have been aware of all the green traffic lights and smiling assistants in the day of the first, unhappy person. Same day, different people, different experiences, the final result depending on your expectations as to how the day would be. Your stress level depended on your expectations and on your filtering.
Your reality
In these examples several things are clear. The day doesn’t exist independently of you. Objectively it is neither a good nor a bad day. The day, in these examples, was what the person involved chose to make of it. The first person focused on so many of the things that weren’t perfect that she created for herself a great deal of stress and aggravation. No matter what happened during the day, good or bad, she had focused on the bad and was feeling thoroughly stressed and unhappy. Her neck muscles were tense and sore, the spasms in her blood vessels had created a headache and when she sat down to dinner she was so uptight she got indigestion. All these problems she put down to the stress in her life. When a friend told her to take up yoga or go to relaxation classes she glowered at him muttering that it was all very well for him, he didn’t have to deal with the stresses she had.
When a colleague phoned the woman who’d had the good day and talked about the office cross-patch and the boss who was never satisfied she would have been surprised to find that her friend had hardly noticed these and that she was still happy and relaxed and looking forward to a good dinner and an enjoyable evening.
Filters exist. If you can make them work in your favour rather than against you, you can have a happy and relaxed day instead of a tense and stressful day. It is your choice.
A friend who I’ll call Sara is a perenially happy optimist. Living in a different city I see her only occasionally but speak to her on the phone often. On one of our Christmas get-togethers she mentioned what a wonderful year it had been for her. I stared at her in surprise. She had her own business, a pleasant daytime restaurant, and it had suffered a major fire as a result of the faulty wiring about which she had several times complained to the landlord. Later burglars had broken into her house and stolen her TV, video machine and a lot of clothing. Her boyfriend of several years had left her and a car crash had left her unable to compete in the dancing competition for which she had been training.
Interested to see her reaction I listed all these things for her. She looked a little surprised and then reluctantly admitted that all those things had happened.
‘However,’ she said, ‘I felt good most of the year and lots of good things came out of it.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, look at the restaurant now. I may have lost three months of business but at least I had a bit of a holiday in that time. It is now newly decorated and looks fantastic and business is picking up again. I got insurance money for the things that were stolen so I now have a new model TV and video, and you know how I love to buy clothes and keep complaining that I have no room for them in the wardrobes. I miss Bob but I must admit I’m enjoying the freedom after five years with him and look at my lovely new car.’
‘What about the dancing that you had to give up?’
Here she had the grace to look a bit sheepish.
‘I think I was really glad of the excuse not to compete. I only really took it up for fun, then I got talked into competing. I suppose I was glad of the excuse to give it up, and look at all the free time it has given me for my painting.’
Can’t you just hear how someone else might have described the year? It could have gone something like this;
‘This has been a dreadful year, thank goodness it’s over. It’s been one stress after another. I lost a lot of money while the restaurant was closed, I had no money coming in and now it’s barely paying its way. Burglaries are so stressful, you feel as if you’ve been violated. All those lovely clothes I lost, I could never replace them. And as for Bob, it just shows, you can’t trust men, some little thing and they up and leave you. As for that idiot in the other car, because of him I’m scared every time I drive and I’ve missed out on dancing. I’ll bet I could have won the competition too, and now my social life is nothing at all.’
It was, or would have been, the same year for both people. The events didn’t change but the interpretation and focus did and so did the experience of stress. Whatever happens around you, your personal experience depends totally on the filters you apply and the attitude you choose to take through that day or year and into the next. This is what determines your level and feeling of stress.
Creating
Now, let’s go back to the beginning of this chapter. I suggested there were two possible reasons why an anticipated good day would follow expectations and an anticipated bad one would do the same. We have discussed the first possibility, the possibility of filtering, the possibility that you filter out all events that don’t fit in with your expectations of the way the day will be.
The second possibility is that, by the very conviction of your expectations, you somehow actually create the type of day you expect to have. Let’s assume both days were your days.
On the anticipated bad day you were already in a bad mood when you left home. When you scowl at shop assistants they tend to scowl back at you. When you show a newcomer to the job that you are cross and impatient they are likely to get more confused and take even longer to get their job done. By the time you stomped into your neighbour’s house for coffee you could have been such poor company that her behaviour to you would have been affected and she might indeed have brought up the problem of the noise your children were making just to show you that she too had stresses to deal with.
On the anticipated good day you would have smiled at everyone you met, been pleasant to the people in the office and generally created good humour around you. Even a cross boss responds positively to a happy smiling member of his staff and is likely to have been less cross than he would have been had you been grumbling about the stresses in your life.
Martin is a typical example of the way your attitude can create your outcome. He had a good position in the city, in the head office of the company. Then he was asked to go to an industrial area and head up a section of the company that was in trouble. He hated it. The position was beneath him, he missed the acknowledgement of his peers, the whole organization was sluggish, his staff were suspicious of him, corning in from outside with new ideas, and they took his appointment as a criticism from head office.
As a result Martin started to complain of the stress he was under. He became cross in the office and barked at the staff when they were too slow. Although excellent in his technical area he had trouble motivating the people in the plant and the outside contractors. Each day he was met with resistance.
‘It’s no good,’ Martin thought. ‘None of them
