Total Read Time: 3 mins.

Fun-O-Meter: 9/10 Giggles

Meaningfulness: 7/10 Aha! Moments

There are a lot of gloomy people out there.

But that’s okay, because you can be the ray of sunshine that turns all of the sad people into daffodils and rose petals.  No, you don’t have to be happy all the time, everyone gets cranky every now and then.  But sometimes your kids will have to deal with sad faces and cranky-bodies, teachers that yell and classmates that hit.

Don’t worry!  If stuff like that is happening around your kids, see it as a test for your child.  Putting them into sticky situations at times can make them stronger.  We don’t want to avoid potentially negative situations, because they are inevitable.

Sheltering your child away from negativity will make them weak, and most importantly, unprepared.

There’s a few tactics I teach to work with seemingly negative situations, but first I want to remind you about worldview and frame control.  A child or any person that does not have a strong set of beliefs instilled upon them will be susceptible to others’ possibly negative ways of life.  We want to keep your kids in a strong positive mindset with everyone they meet.  They must not sway to the dark side, for Darth Vader is a toughie and pretty smart at convincing people to be evil just like him, even Luke almost turned into a bad guy at one point.  Remember Peter Pan’s kids in Hook?  That ol’ salty fish convinced Petey’s kids to be mean pirates.  Who knows what would have happened if he didn’t save them.  That’s why it’s a good idea to prepare your child for these situations.

I like to call it “Conversational Jujitsu.”

Why is there negativity in the world in the first place?  When someone is angry or feeling sad, it’s because they have an expectation that has not been met.  This is where the groundwork for negativity begins.  How one deals with these unmet expectations is the important part.  You can choose to decide if you are going to be negatively reactive about a situation or not.  The secret trick to this is that it’s all up to you.

There’s no magic fairy flying around deciding if you should be happy or sad, nor is it some biological response that your brain automatically reacts to when you are presented with an unmet expectation.  It’s just a choice.

Let’s say you ordered a gift for your sister’s birthday party on the Internet, except that it was delivered a week late.*

*Hypothetical situation

There’s two choices you can make:  become upset, or don’t.

No matter how you react, the situation will not change.  When you think about it, it is never the situation that makes us feel bad, it is always how we react to the situation that decides how our day will turn out.  No matter what, a gift came late, it’s neither a bad or good thing, it’s just a thing.  Will you choose to get angry over this, or will you take a step back and realize that it really doesn’t matter?  And it makes me think, is there anything in the world that could warrant making yourself feel angry or sad?

My favorite cliché says it all, “Life’s too short.”

When you can accept this, and I mean fully accept the fact that it is always you who chooses the emotional climate of a situation, that is when you are able to prove this to your children.  There’s two ways to do this, as there are two ways to teach your children everything that you’ve learned and will continue to learn on this blog:  Directly and indirectly.  When little Johnny sees that you are not the type of person to waste time becoming emotionally reactive to life, he’ll happily follow suit.  We can be this way because our parents told us to be this way, indirectly of course.  But it’s not their fault, this is the accepted social norm in our society:  We don’t decide how we feel, the situation decides.  But you can change all that now for the sake of your children and their future, and for the sake of your grand kids; they will thank you.

Just a ‘lil food for thought.