You know when you watch your favorite show and person 1 tells person 2: “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”?
Inevitably, the bad news is WAY worse than the good news.
We’ve all gotten some bad news, right? And, it SUCKS!
Overshare: Yesterday, someone in my circle shared with me some pretty scary health news. I pictured the moment they would have received the diagnosis from their health professional. I imagined what they went through and aligning how they want to arrange all the elements of their life.
Today, I would want to find a book for myself and a book for everyone who gets bad news, from the smallest tidbit to the most life-altering news there is. I want this book to be something that makes them feel like they’re not alone and that there’s something good.
Overshare: I’m actually really not sure if I can solve this in a MiniBook. I figure it would take a dozen great psychologists and philosophers to get together and find the perfect comforting words that would help countless people work through daily troubles to life-altering problems. I’ll give it a shot. Wish me luck 🙂
Let’s do this!
Life can be interesting, right? Humans are fragile creatures with fragile parts. Health is precious. Love can be lost. Earth is a delicate planet. We get food in our teeth while talking to someone we want to impress. Eggs break.
There are no guarantees in life. We will not all have ponies as children. We will not all automatically have a fabulous prom. We will not all going to be the best at everything.
We will, however have some good parts (hopefully, we noticed them) and some bad parts (we generally notice this easily). And, we will get bad news. Some of this news will be about others, some will be for ourselves. As common as bad news is, finding the way through the storm of bad news seems to be something we struggle with.
“Your most difficult and devastating moments also shapes your deepest wisdom.”
-Brendon Burchard
We hear that the rain will bring rainbows, the challenges of our life bring us wisdom, show us who our real friends are and who we can trust, show us what we’re made of and that we’re stronger than we think, and a bucket of other consolations.
These kind words of consolation and hope are there to makes us feel good and helps us through a hardship.
Do they work? Do they ACTUALLY help ANYONE?
Overshare: There are times when the promise of inner strength within myself have helped me tremendously. But I’m a bit of a sucker for sweet words. and quotes.
I want to be more concrete in this MiniBook!
The Goal
Let’s be clear: My goal is to be ultimately able to face challenges and bad news with enough wisdom, strength and courage that what we consider to be bad news to become something we have a peaceful relationship with. How does that sound?
In order to obtain that goal, I feel that we benefit from embracing six basic truths:
- Life is impermanent.
- Lives are fragile.
- Things happen, I call them Happenings. We cannot avoid them.
- Our perspective of what is good and bad is not Universal.
- We will have challenges and bad news in our life.
- We can’t control most of what happens in life.
Achieving a goal as big as being comfortable with handling bad news might not be possible, however I do believe it’s possible to find our own ways to lessen the place it takes in our life. I do believe that the place the bad news takes in our life is under our control if we put our mind to it.
How much space are you going to give it?
This is a personal decision, however I believe we all benefit from asking Ourself: How much space am I going to give this issue in my life?
Will we choose to give it commanding space and take over?
Will we tell that challenge that it can be with us, but will not be controlling our life?
Sidenote: Imagine a car and place the bad news in the place in the car where it belongs in your eyes: Will it be the driver’s seat? Will it be in the trunk? Will it be giving you directions as you drive your life?
Love, Comfort, Fear & The Unknown
We love feeling comfortable in our daily life, the predictability of our routine and Ourself. We love to control the changes in our life and when we don’t control a change, we think of it as luck if it was positive and we think of it as all kinds of bad when it’s something negative.
We are the ones putting the label “positive” and “negative”.
I feel these fall under our illusion of what we think life “should” be.
Support
When we share my bad news with others, we want a few things:
- Get it out of our system
- Support
- Understanding
- Maybe advice or maybe listening only
Bad News Likes Misery
Overshare: I got some pretty bad news a few days ago. Boy, did it ever crush. I felt terrible. I cried a lot, and kept listening. It occurred to me that I was thinking about if I was going to talk about it or not. And that thought on its own made me realize that bad news doesn’t like to be shared, so I’m going to share the crap out of it! I’m going to call my loved ones and I’m going to talk and cry all the way through it!
I thought of all my loved ones and all the bad news they’ve probably received in their lives and kept inside.
I thought of the bad news that I kept inside myself thinking that I would talk about it “later”.
Bursting the balloon of bad news turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done in the face of something like this!
The Good News Is…
Going back to “I have good news and bad news”… It brings me comfort to think that when we get bad news, that there is some good news that we might be able to see because bad news takes so much space.
We feel the left toe we just stumped, but we don’t think of our right ear that is perfectly comfortable. We feel our brain when we have a headache, but do we even think about our brain when we don’t?
There is probably WAY more good stuff going on than bad. We simply notice the bad.
So, the good news is, I believe we can learn to feel and see all the good news around us. Not to ignore the bad, but to balance it.
And there it is!
“You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have: The facts of life, the facts of life.”
-Facts of Life TV sitcom lyric
Enjoy the day 🙂
Karine