Living Life by Design

• The Challenge: 30 days without complaining.
• The Consequence: If you complain, you must immediately hand the person you’re talking to a $1 or $5 bill. If you’re complaining on the phone, Skype, or anything else indirect, you must hand the person closest to you the $1 or $5 bill (or you can have a jar in the office everyone contributes to).
• The Process: Tomorrow, put $20 to $100 in $1 or $5 dollar bills in your pocket. Your goal is to make it through the month without giving them all away.
• The Reason: We’re doing this not just because complaining drives other people away from you, no matter how valid you may feel your grievance is, but because complaining is a misdirection of energy. And, truthfully, we all have much more productive things to do with our time.

All complaints, including negative talk about others or yourself, are just frustrated wishes. And there are two types of wishes: ones that you can make come true and ones that you have no control over.

The first type of wish can be resolved through an action, typically a request. If you are complaining about a waiter’s service, the wish is: “I wish I had better service.” And you can make this come true by requesting better service from the waiter, by moving to another table, by going to another restaurant, or any number of other steps.

It is when you sit there impotently, not taking any action or making any direct request, that a complaint bubbles up. And a complaint is like very mild aspirin: It offers temporary relief, but the problem is still there.

In fact, you will notice that if you take calm, effective, and fair action when something reasonable is upsetting you or making you anxious, you will actually no longer feel a need to complain. Even if your action is a respectful request that isn’t granted, you now can now accept the reality of the situation, and remove yourself from it.

Usually you’ll find that the action or request takes less time and energy than the sum total of all the complaining.

As for complaints that are actually wishes you have no control over, such as being upset that it’s raining, you’re smart enough to know that this is just wasted energy and misdirected frustration. If you have absolutely no control over something, accept it. To be effective, you need to work within the parameters of reality, not around them.

Remember that whenever you are complaining, this is a signal that you are managing your life badly.

So if you’re up for an easy self-improvement exercise, then we start tomorrow, and go for exactly 30 days. Be sure to let me know how you did…