Mette Nohr Claushoj took my course, Creativity and Personal Mastery, at Columbia Business School more than two decades ago. She sent me an email recently that has insights I thought you would find useful.
I am sharing it with you with her permission.
Peace!
Srikumar Rao
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Dear Professor Rao,
I am writing to you from beautiful Pienza in Tuscany where I am to be celebrating my 50th birthday in a couple of days. I do not feel anywhere near 50 years on the inside, but for the last several years I have had the great fortune of feeling more content and more settled emotionally than at any previous period of my life.
CPM continues to be a source of joy for me – the connections I made were so much more profound than most other connections I have ever made, and to this day I treasure continued friendships with people from the community.
I thought of something recently and got the idea that it might fit into one of your enlightening CPM stories. So here goes:
Many years ago I was very annoyed with myself for locking myself out and having to pay the exorbitant fee of a locksmith to get in just because I was stupid enough to forget my keys. Again.
Then, something struck me. I recalled several other times over the years when I had locked myself out and needed a locksmith or, my favorite pet peeve, the times I had had to immediately replace new clothing because I had accidentally ruined them by, for instance, cutting a hole into them when cutting off a tag on a shirt or leaning over a bunch of lilies and having the brown dust ruin the fabric of a new shirt.
And it hit me that stuff like this happening was a fact of life. An annoying fact, to be sure, but something to be expected.
I decided, then and there, that since, apparently, doing stupid things from time to time was an inescapable part of my life, I might as well plan for it. So, I thought to myself that I would mentally budget for having to spend some money because of some stupid mistake about 4 to 5 times per year.
Now, when something like the above happens, it’s not like I enjoy it, rather that I deal with it as I would trips to the dentist: something that I know I have to do from time to time.
Over the years I have used the same way of thinking on many, many issues, and I can say without hesitation and without exaggeration that this shift in mindset has allowed me to live without any measurable amount of daily annoyance for at least 10 years. I simply do not get annoyed over life’s small daily … perturbances… because I expect them to happen.
Another example: I love being with and around children, and I have a seemingly endless supply of patience for them except in one particular regard: I cannot stand whining. I am not talking sadness, of course, but pure whining – the sounds emanating from a child (or adult!) who isn’t getting their way/wish in some trivial matter and react as if they have been wronged to the fullest extent of the meaning of the word (in adults it usually comes across as unjustified entitlement).
So, when I began picking my niece up from day care on a weekly basis when she was two and a half, I decided to teach her not to whine when around me – and to expect to have to tell her 400 times before she got it.
This fundamentally changed my approach: Every time she whined I saw it as the chance for us to get one step closer to the end goal of no whining altogether. I turned it into a sort of common project for us where we were counting down to the big prize of no whining. Instead of scolding her or being exasperated or losing my patience, I would remind her that whining wasn’t working at my house, and we had to find another way for her to communicate with me such as, for example, by asking for my help or telling me in words that she was disappointed.
She quickly stopped whining when with me and when from time to time she reverted back to it, I would make jokes a la asking her (with a big smile on my face) “oh my goodness, sweetheart, did you forget that I don’t speak whining?”. I turned it into a kind of game we were playing, something we were training for together. We got to no whining way before 400 times (more like 30 or something), but that is besides the point – the point being that every situation in which she did whine – instead of me reacting with ‘oh gawd, she is whining AGAIN’ – became a box to be ticked as finished, a job done, a step closer to our goal.
Almost every day I notice people who have what, on the surface, looks like charmed lives, be railroaded by fully expectable snafus into states of deep annoyance. I wish they could learn to expect crap to happen and plan for how to deal with it rather than seemingly be taken by surprise over and over again by life’s not always going to plan and other people not always behaving or reacting in exactly the way they would have preferred in traffic, at home or wherever people spend their lives.
I once read about a woman in Eastern Europe – back in the days when communism was crumbling as a form of government in that part of the world – who said that people in the West always expected their lives to be like life was presented in commercials and were disappointed when most of the time when those visions didn’t unfold in the exact way they had imagined. People in Eastern Europe, on the other hand, she said, always expected life to be hard, for bad things to happen, for obstacles to be in their way. So, when daily life was like that, it didn’t change their mood. Only when nothing crappy happened did it affect their moods – by them being thrilled by the unforeseen ease of life, luck, happiness.
Moral: expect life to suck several times per day, plan for how to deal with it when it does, and reap the benefits of not being annoyed because you are not unpleasantly surprised.
I hope you are doing really well, professor. I am grateful that you chose to use your talents to enlighten people and bring them closer to a sense of meaningful living.
Hugs from Mette
