First published 25 March 2019 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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Back in episode 17 we mentioned E+R=O and never explained it, so this one puts that right. E is the event and R is how you respond to it. Put them together and you get O, the outcome. Nigel's example was me. I turned up at his house at 10:14, and as far as he was concerned I should have been there by 9:59 and 59 seconds.
The event is just the event. He could have been glad I'd made it round the M25 in one piece and put the coffee on. Or he could decide I'm selfish, that I don't respect him, and start the whole morning in a mood. He reckons he gave himself nine minutes to be annoyed and then let it go. (He's brought it up in about 27 episodes since, by his own count, so make of that what you will.)
Some people hold on for decades. Nigel's version is the lad who wasn't picked for butterfly at the school swimming gala, so he stopped talking to his best mate and never went back to Belgium, and now he can't remember why. Or the family where Auntie Mabel says you must never speak to Susie again and nobody knows what happened. Too often, he says, we'd rather be right than happy.
For me it was a question someone put to me about five years before. Has life happened to you, or for you? I used to be a proper “why does this keep happening to me” person. Once I started asking what I could learn from the so-called bad stuff, a lot shifted, and it's made me better at understanding what other people go through. Then Nigel tested me. We were sat about seven feet apart and he asked if he could make me feel good or bad from there. Not unless he walked over and punched me.
His top read for this one was Man's Search for Meaning, which he calls short and life-changing. He also gave a nod to Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines, who took on the big airlines without blaming British Airways or Virgin. And he signed off with “Hope is not a strategy.”
Worth remembering
- Split what happened from how you reacted. The event's just the event.
- Let yourself be annoyed for a bit (Nigel's limit is nine minutes), then let it go.
- Ask whether life happened to you or for you, and look for what the rough bits can teach you.
- Nobody sat seven feet away can make you feel anything. How you take it is down to you.
We have choices to make about how we react to certain situations, and too often, we would rather be right than happy.
Nigel Risner
You could do something that I could decide to feel good or bad about.
Neil Martin
