Frustration can prevent you from getting on with your life and being successful. We show you 7 things you can do about it.
Frustration is the response you develop when you cannot meet a stated goal. Each person has a different degree of tolerance for it, so your ability to recover varies according to this tolerance. Today we present 7 keys to overcome frustration that you can use to prevent these feelings from consuming you.
This reaction is often accompanied by helplessness, stress, disappointment, and even low self-esteem. Throughout life we have to deal with multiple frustrations, so having the tools to deal with them is very important. Our advice to overcome frustration will then be a great ally for the future as well.
7 tips to overcome frustration
Frustration is conditioned by multiple factors, both internal and external. Your expectations, will or interest to develop the project, the skills you have, your attitude and your ability to solve problems are some of the most important.
Experts agree in which motivation plays a central role in frustration. It helps both to reduce the chances of it happening, and to mediate so that you recover faster from one. Also, keep in mind that frustration is the emotional response you develop to failure.
That is, and based on your tolerance to it, you will manifest frustrations in situations that you can value as failures. With all of this as an introduction, we present you with the best tips to overcome frustration that you can use to get up and go.
1. Check what has caused you to feel frustrated
We have already stipulated that frustration is the emotions you develop in the face of failure. In general, anger, disappointment, helplessness, stress, intolerance, and bitterness are the most common.. In order to overcome a frustration, you have to first identify what has made you manifest these feelings.
We are not talking about the catalyst itself (a complicated assignment at work, for example), but what really triggered the reaction (not completing the assignment on time, lack of skills and abilities to complete it, and so on).
Identifying what exactly has made you feel frustrated is essential to understand why you have reacted in one way or another. It will allow you to see the problem from another perspective, so next time you can have better tools to control it.
2. Accept what happened
Yes, it is something very evident; But in practice, people carry past frustrations for months and even years. So that this does not happen to you, you must accept them, which also implies accepting that for the moment you did not channel your emotions in the best way.
This is not something that should have greater significance, at least not if you consider that we are all wrong. Failure is a part of life, sometimes in the same proportion as successes. Accepting that you have not been able to meet your goals does not imply that you cannot try once more to achieve them. This brings us to our next tip for overcoming frustration.
3. Learn from your mistakes
Researchers they agree that frustration is a source of learning. This is something that has been repeated for decades, and yet millions of people waste their stumbles to obtain teachings. A frustration will be a failure to the extent that you consider it as such. If you assume otherwise, it will become a source of opportunity.
We have already motivated you to identify the sources of your frustrations. Once you do, and also accept things as they happened, you can continue to learn from these mistakes. We leave you with some ideas that can help you:
- Take a step back to breathe and calm down when you think your emotions will win the game.
- If something is not turning out the way you expect it, stop and assess what you are doing wrong.
- The accumulated fatigue can play against you. Make sure to rest and recharge your batteries to perform better.
- Regulate your expectations based on what you can do (higher goals can lead to bigger frustrations).
This is just an example, as the teachings you get should be based on your specific mistakes. The more you dig into the experiences, the more learnings you will achieve.
4. Be flexible with your next goals
Overcoming frustration also means planning what you will do to prevent it from invading you again. In this sense, this happens with being flexible with your next goals. Flexible with the times in which you expect to obtain results, flexible with your ability to adapt, with the licenses that you can give yourself to calm down and with the difficulty of the problem itself.
Many frustrations occur because you are not kind to yourself. You treat yourself like a machine, and you forget that attention, care, and self-integrity are important too. There is nothing wrong with prioritizing your things over others, especially when you know that by doing so you are saving yourself a lot of frustrations.
5. Recognize your limits
We all have limits. It is not dishonorable to admit it, quite the contrary. In this case, recognizing your limits will allow you to establish the difficulty of the goals, as well as devise strategies that allow you to overcome it. For example, if you do an exercise in honesty and recognize your weak points, you can work on them to strengthen them.
When you push your limits without having done the latter, it is natural that the achievement will appear many frustrations. Along the way, you can take into account everything that we have already discussed, especially that in relation to learning from mistakes.
6. Don’t be afraid to ask for help
Sometimes the key to overcoming a frustration is to ask for help. By this we mean both professional help and that which you can find around you. Remember what we pointed out at the beginning: we have a different tolerance for it, so don’t expect your recovery process to be the same as everyone else.
In your partner, in a friend, a family member or a colleague you can find a shoulder on which to unload your frustrations, not to mention that they can help you identify where the problem is. If this persists you can always opt for professional help, since it is very likely to be related to other problems such as low self-esteem, anxiety and others.
7. Get up and move on
In the end, the only viable solution is to get up and move on. Each fall implicitly integrates the act of getting up, so that sooner or later you will have to do it. Of course, take your time and order your ideas and feelings; so your next steps are safer and more stable.
Frustration is part of life. They are not exclusive to yours, as all people must deal with them as part of their journey. The same is true of error, failure, or disappointment. This does not imply that you have to get used to them, but that you must understand that they will come. So you can be prepared when they do.
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