See an opportunity in everything

When life throws you a nasty surprise what is your first reaction? Do you whine and cry that you always get the bad deals or do you wonder what opportunity this could be for you to take up?

What is the difference here? You still get the nasty surprise, but the approach to handling the nasty surprise is different. Which one would be the easier to handle?

It seems fairly obvious to me that life is easier to cope with if we have a positive attitude. Yet some people hang onto this negativity and complain about everything that goes wrong in their life.

We miss the bus, we complain. We have a few rainy days and it’s dreadful. Then there’s the car breaking down and it’s a disaster. What about the time your computer crashed and you lost a ton of data...was it as if the end of the world had hit you.?

Interestingly, any one of these could be an opportunity. Just to take the computer breaking down as an example. This could be a great opportunity to replace old technology with new, share the experience and spare others the misery, finally get that subscription to carbonite.com and never worry about hard drive failure again. It’s a great opportunity for a better deal.

If you approach each set-back as an opportunity suddenly things start to work better and it’s easier to cope. Whereas if you throw a huge amount of negativity at the situation it is much more difficult to cope with and leads to more frustration.

Of course it seems easier to write about seeing the opportunity on a beautiful day like today. The trick is to react that way when faced with the situation. Depends on what else is going on in your life this is often a challenging task. Loosing a hard drive with customer data, financial reports, or that term paper that is due tomorrow may require more creativity. . If you are already suffering because of other situations not playing out in your favor can also influence how a set-back affects you.

It really can be difficult to look at life with optimism when you are constantly battered with problems. You could have been diagnosed with having a major life threatening illness, find out you are being retrenched and your car breaks down. To be able to face all of these with optimism may seem impossible to do.

But then, facing life with disappointment and negativity makes all these difficult patches so much more awful to have to live through. Looking for the opportunity in them could be what makes life suddenly worth living.

It isn’t always the bad situations where you are able to look for opportunities. There are many instances where just ordinary situations can offer endless new opportunities for you. If you are open to seeing them regardless of what situation you find yourself in, it will be so much easier to grab hold of them.

You could be having lunch with a friend and find yourself discussing the possibility of sharing the costs of traveling to a country you have wanted to visit for a while. Or you could strike up a conversation with somebody next to you on a flight and find you have similar business interests and could do something together.

Whatever the situation, if you are actively viewing all of life with an open mind you will find that it gives you many more opportunities to achieve your goals.