“…When troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy.” James 1:2 NLT
In my earlier post, I stated that gratitude is the secret ingredient that leads to joy. But the truth is, in a tough situation, the last thing on your mind is to be grateful. You want to vent, cry, and just tell the predicament to anyone who cares to listen. Yes, gratitude is the necessary action you need to take to get out of that rut, but how do you get to that point of being grateful?
When things go wrong, one of the first things we feel is emotion. The brain sends these signals into the body and suddenly, we start acting differently. While we know that we want to stay joyful in that situation, something else influences us in split seconds. How then do we make the switch from being driven by our emotions to gratitude and then joy?
1. Be aware of how you feel
Emotion is not bad. How we react is what can be called bad. You must understand that it’s perfectly okay to feel a certain way about something, whether that’s being angry, sad, bitter, or remorseful.
Your emotions are there for a reason and it becomes a problem when you don’t feel emotion because it’s part of our physiology. The only problem is we let these emotions drive us. I have been driven by anger more times than I can count. But being aware doesn’t mean acting out the emotion. It means being able to stop yourself in your tracks and ask, “how do I feel about this?” Or something like, “Do I feel sad, angry, or resentful about what my colleague just did to me?”
After awareness, what next?
2. Use the emotion as nothing but a signal
When you become aware of how you feel, the emotion becomes less of a driver and more of just a signal. It’s like a prompt on which you can base your next line of action on. What you do next depends on your goal.
Do you want to switch to gratitude or be powerless to the emotion? It’s so much easier to let emotion rule us. I’ve been a victim of this, but I know that this is the point where I become intentional about allowing joy into my heart. So, I started practising it and the change has been phenomenal. Whatever you do at this point will influence the next few moments of your life.
Every troublesome situation at work and in life is an opportunity to be joyful. But as the focus scripture says, you must consider it as an opportunity. It won’t just work out automatically because it’s a very manual process in the initial stages. Like everything else, practice makes perfect.
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