How To Move Past Your Pity Party

I’m going through a crappy experience at work right now.

The situation is this: My business partner-in-crime, the peanut butter to my jelly, the professional love of my life, Lauren Fitzgerald, is moving to New York City because her husband got a (fabulous) job in the Big Apple.

Boo.

When you’re an entrepreneur and own a very small consulting company, the people you work with are a very big deal.

They’re everything.

So here’s the plot line of my pity party: This sucks, I’m so sad, I’m going to be so lonely. Woe is me.

But I finally found a way out of my pity party after listening to a podcast called Your Soul Purpose.

This latest life lesson to change my life is an equation below regarding how the world works and it looks like this:

E + R = O. 

E = The events in your life.
R = Your reaction to those events.
O = The ultimate outcome

The equation indicates that the events in your life don’t control your life. You have a say.

Life is not in charge, you are. There’s an important variable in the equation…called you.

After listening to the podcast, thankfully this time on a treadmill instead of on my bike, I took away two valuable lessons.

First, the events in your life are what they are, and you can’t often control them. There’s nothing in the world I can do to prevent this current situation from taking place.

I’m a control freak, so that’s a hard thing for me to say, but it’s the truth. I could lie down in the road in front of their moving truck as it pulls out of Virginia, but that feels borderline insane. As much as I cherish control, I am not in control of somebody on my team moving to another state.

The “E” in the equation is what it is.

The second thing I realized is that while I’m not in control of this situation, I am, indeed, in control of my reaction to the situation. I get to choose how I respond. And while I could continue to lie in my bed and forecast a lonely life of isolation and despair, why choose the negative instead of the positive?

The “R” in the equation is what you make it.

OK, let’s do this.

The minute I stepped off the treadmill and back into reality I made a conscious choice to look at this situation differently.

One of my favorite self-help gurus, Wayne Dyer, says that when you change the way you look at things…the things you look at change.

Indeed.

I can’t change the situation I’m facing, so why not change the way I look at it?

We’re going to make it work so Lauren can still work for The Mom Complex, and we’ve made a pact to do what my aunt says is the secret to life: “seek the silver lining.”

Interesting approach.

What if I gave myself permission to move past the downside and search for the upside?

With this newfound outlook, Lauren and I have already found two silver linings. One, she’s moving closer to her family, which is a remarkable gift.  And two, she’s moving closer to many of our clients.

Two points for NYC.

And of course the shopping, shows, and aiports are soooooooo much better in NYC. So jealous.

But jealousy feels better than misery.

What’s interesting is that when you’re open to a new perspective, you start seeing similar messages and wisdom everywhere you look. Just yesterday I was reading You’ll See It When You Believe It by Wayne Dyer and these wise words jump off the page, “When you believe it’s the events in your life that make you unhappy, you have yet to realize that you are stranded in the misery by the way you’re processing those events.”

Touché.

So smart, that Wayne Dyer.

While this notion looking for the good in a bad situation might sound like airy-fairy, rose-colored glasses pipe smoke…it isn’t.

It’s practical advice that can be implemented immediately.

Last Tuesday I got on a treadmill with a bad attitude and a sad heart and I got off with a swagger in my step and on a mission to control the controllable.

I’m now directing my time and energy toward controlling what I can actually control, my reaction.

E + R = O.

Once a control freak, always a control freak.