You are looking at your email today and seeing that you have a communication from your boss letting you know how awful your performance is in every way imaginable. When you think about responding all kinds of frustration comes up because you have already tried to change your boss’ perspective on numerous occasions through rational explanations and reasonable agreements. You begin to do the same and then you realize that you are caught in the negative emotion of frustration.

Frustration happens when you have the correct goal in a situation, but you are utilizing the wrong process or pattern. It is just the opposite of disappointment where the goal or expectation is incorrect, but the pattern is the right one. The attachment with frustration is to using the same pattern of behavior because it was probably successful at sometime in a different context in the past. As soon you feel frustration the key is to change the pattern. It means getting unstuck from using the same thing that isn’t bearing much fruit. Often frustration makes you do something with more effort or more intensity, but the results still get you nowhere.

In the above scenario a heated exchange of who is right or who is wrong is not going to get you anywhere. It may make you feel self-righteous, but you won’t get to where you want to go. With disappointment your energy level goes down approaching something like sadness or depression, but with frustration it rises and approaches anger.

In the above scenario the boss throws in the bait and then you can get caught taking the bait and running with it ending up no closer to the goal. Frustration throws you into a negative mind state where you are seeing negatives in the past, like the person’s actions, and then responding with negative action of your own. It is a lose-lose situation. When someone is throwing negative comments your way, the solution is not to throw negative comments back at them, but to find your positive mind, then calm down and give yourself a lot of choice in the way to respond.

Where is the positive mind when people are throwing negatives at you right and left? The positive mind starts in your memory of positive experiences, embodying the memories by actually feeling them, and then allowing the positive memories to inform the positive possibilities in the future of what your actions might be. It is easy to be triggered in the modern world because people mostly believe that that they have the right to get heated and respond accordingly. It only seems to raise your energy for a short time before everything comes crashing down with you being no closer to the goals. When you let go of feeling like there is one solution to the fix you are in and then access your positive memories, you have an inner calm and renewed enthusiasm for new approaches.

If you understand that frustration means that you have to change the negative mind space you are in to a positive one, then it is easier to get to new ideas. For instance, you could choose to not respond respond to the boss or you could choose to ask him for a raise.