This is an interesting blog post. It reminds me of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the things thought by Stephen Covey is the “you bring your own weather to work” technique, where basically, you can come to work happy, or come to work pissed. You choose that. If you ran into some jerk in traffic on the way to work and got really mad about that, you’ll think about that all day at work and it’ll spoil your entire work day. If you just said “ah well!” and moved on, not spending any further thought into that and let nothing bad annoy you, then you proceed to have a good day at work. It’s basically a spiral effect where one bad thing will lead to another, and one good thing will lead to another.
The blog post talks about how hostage-negotiators have a 95% success rate, which really seems kind of hard to believe. A pushy car salesman couldn’t get such a success rate. But it’s because hostage-negotiators can actually make that human connection with the hostage taker, whereas most salesmen just want you to give up your money and then jump on the next prospect — sans the human connection part, since that part is kind of lengthy and requires effort. When you react negatively to a negative event that just happened to you, you become the hostage-taker. The hostage-taker is misunderstood, wants to be heard, and wants sympathy.
Anyway, this reminds me that you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to an event.