Practice What You Preach?

How many times have we heard that we must practice what we preach?  Never was that truer for me than this past week.  I was in the midst of preparing a talk on stress management and specifically creating a slide focused on the premise that while we cannot control what happens to us in life, we are able to control, even under the most difficult circumstances, what we will feel and how we will react, a concept wonderfully illustrated in Viktor Frankel’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”.  

I was finalizing the slide when a message popped up on my computer saying my internet connection was lost.  I rushed downstairs to investigate and discovered that the tree cutting team at work in my neighbor’s yard had dropped a large branch over the fence and as it fell, it took with it the cable providing my tv and internet, all of which were now floating in my pool.  

My immediate reaction was one of anger, frustration, and blame. I started to berate the workers, envisioning endless problems ahead in both my professional and personal life, the most immediate being the need to finalize and send my stress management presentation prior to an afternoon meeting in which we were scheduled to review it. 

And then it happened.  It struck me that I was experiencing in this moment exactly the type of situation I had been describing in my slide.  I was highly stressed, and angry but the anger was a choice. Knowing that meant knowing that I also had other choices available.  Uttering a mental curse, I realized that I could not in good conscience, now that I was aware of what I was doing, choose to indulge myself in anger and vent that anger on others, but could make instead of a choice that would better serve me.   I wondered how I could possibly preach a message of making a thoughtful choice to a group when in being confronted by this relatively minor inconvenience, I could not practice it myself.  

Even with the realization that I had the power to define my response, it took real effort to pull myself back from that strong emotional reaction. I first had to recognize that what had happened was an accident and there was no bad intent.  While a part of me wanted badly to blame my neighbor, I was able to wrestle that feeling back, knowing she was trying to resolve ongoing issues of her own and minimize the potential risks these trees presented to her home.  With only minor lingering resentment, I refocused my energy on solving the dilemma of getting my internet restored quickly and finding alternatives to support clients in the interim.

As I let go of the anger and replaced it with a focus on problem-solving, I was able to see potential solutions and within 24 hours I had workable plans in place to manage all my ongoing business and an appointment to have my cable restored within a few days.  I also noticed that nasty feeling that had so quickly lodged itself in my chest was gone.  

Several days later, as I was finalizing my talk, I was struck a second time. I had initially considered the coincidental timing of the cable breaking and the preparation of my stress management presentation to be a story of irony and one I could dine out on for years to come.  And then I realized that the timing couldn’t have been better in terms of learning, in a truly profound way, that one really can choose how to react in any given situation.   What seemed on the surface to be most ironic was instead a magnificent gift that had been bestowed upon me.