How many times have you been frustrated this week? More than you’d probably like to admit.
Frustration is an emotion we’d all like to avoid. It’s not only personally unpleasant, but it also tends to stress and damage relationships. This is bad for business.
Proactively managing (and perhaps even avoiding frustration) is an important objective to consider in your own life, but it’s also an important issue to consider when coaching your agents to work with their clients.
To help with this topic, we’ll reference a recent article written by Eric Barker. Eric is a regular contributor to several national publications and he manages the very popular Barking Up the Wrong Tree blog. If you haven’t done so already, check out his work.
Eric’s thesis is: Every individual has the opportunity to reduce the frustration level he or she is experiencing to near zero. How could this possibly be done? It’s by knowing your ABCs.
The Tyranny of Should
Finding a solution to frustration starts with understanding it’s source. Many people believe frustration is a result of circumstances.
That’s not true. Frustration is the result of our beliefs about the circumstances going on around us.
This idea dates back to the Stoics (ancient philosophers), but was popularized more recently by Albert Ellis, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century. Ellis once said,
If you understand how you upset yourself by slipping into irrational shoulds, oughts, demands, and commands, unconsciously sneaking them into your thinking, you can just about always stop disturbing yourself about anything.
Here’s an example of how this works. We’ve had trouble last week with the internet service in our office. We faithfully pay Comcast for every month of business grade internet service and expect information to flow in and out of the company without interruptions.
It should work.
Any interruption in the service drives me crazy. It’s extremely frustrating!
Is my frustration justified? Perhaps.
When I bought the internet service, I knew Comcast sometimes experience outages. I also knew their technical support and customer service were infamously poor. I purchased the service (in spite of these known problems) because I wanted the high internet speeds at a lower cost than other solutions.
I told myself, “Those outages happen to consumers and a small number of other businesses, but it won’t happen to me.” To further solidify my false belief, the service worked great for three years.
I fully convinced myself the Comcast service “should” work (I know many of your are laughing hysterically right now at such an irrational belief). But once that belief was lodged in my brain, frustration was inevitable.
Defeating Frustration
Eric says the key to defeating frustration is summed up in this simple belief:
The universe is not taking orders from you (sorry).
What should be true and what is true quite often are different. As much as we believe “the should,” we’ll experience frustration.
There is a simple acrostic (ABCD) that Eric uses to explain this idea in more detail.
A is adversity. Comcast internet service sometimes doesn’t work.
B is your beliefs. And often they’re irrational. “My Comcast internet should always work….especially since I pay extra for the business level service.” Right….that’s a ridiculous belief.
C is consequences. I get angry, frustrated or depressed when my internet goes down.
D: Dispute your irrational beliefs. “Wait a second. When did the universe guarantee me a trouble-free Comcast existence? It didn’t. Internet outages have happened before. It will happen again. And I will survive.”
To defeat frustration in your life, Eric recommends the following actions.
Look for beliefs that hold the words “should”, “ought” or “must.” That’s where the problems lie.
You’re allowed to wish, want and desire. Nobody is saying you need to be an emotionless lump.
But you can’t demand the universe bend to your will. That’s where the frustration and anger creep in — because that godlike insistence isn’t rational.
Is disputing your irrational beliefs going to immediately change everything? No.
But when you start disputing you’ll see that your expectations aren’t in line with reality. And with a little work, those expectations will start to change.
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