In talking to someone earlier in the week, they shared with me their frustration over something they were trying to accomplish. In their mind, things were to go one way. Yet when they tried twice, things unfolded much differently.
As I listened to this person vent and get things off of his chest, I believed that his frustration was isolated to this one incident. But a moment of silence changed everything. For quickly after this silence they shared more frustration about another thing in their life that needed attention.
Piling on is a term you hear in football when someone tackles someone and then others fall on top of them. When you hear the term it means that it is harder to come out or up from the bottom of all of this weight.
What occurred to me after hanging up from this long phone conversation, was that it was the person himself that was piling on different things on top of this one, most current, frustration. It seemed like the person was confused, frustrated, unsure of the future, left with little hope. The weight of all the things they were worried about felt too oppressive to overcome.
This is not an easy place to be. What is hard for that person to recognize is that they themselves were adding the weight of some many different things giving them the impression that they were helpless and immovable.
We all have been in this situation. Felt lousy about so many things. What we need to do is not pile everything on top of our feelings of frustration over one thing. Our focus and strength, at that specific moment in time, is to rip apart the different things that frustrate us and work on one thing at a time. The weight is not as heavy working through each frustration sequentially rather than in parallel.
Different choices, different ways of doing something, or changing our goals slightly together with the understated strength of patience give us both a chance and hope for a better tomorrow.
When you feel yourself piling on to your current frustration take a deep breath and simply stop it. There is no one around you. You are doing it to yourself. Just this small change in perspective will make all the difference in the world as you pick yourself up and begin working, once again, on a better tomorrow.