Welcome to episode eight of Up and Not Crying. This is your host, Beth Repp. I am an MD ophthalmologist and certified life coach. Up and not crying is a Norwegian response to, "How are you today?" It's an honest response. Hey, I'm up and not crying. So far so good. In this podcast, you will learn self-improvement and coaching tools to engineer your mindset, your mood, and your schedule. We make your real life feel better. In this episode, we're gonna rethink negative experiences. How is this happening for me? How do I know what's good or what's bad? So let's just start today with an ancient Taoist parable. Taoism is an ancient Chinese philosophical and religious tradition. So this parable is often called the Parable of the Chinese Farmer. This dates back to 200 BC, so 2,200 years ago. Now, there are many versions of this story that involve a Chinese farmer and his horse, and I'm gonna paraphrase just one of the many versions that are written. A farmer owned a horse, a highly valued possession at this time. So remember, this is over 2,000 years ago. One day, the horse runs away. A friend visits the farmer to say how sorry he is to hear of the lost horse. The farmer simply says, "Who knows what's good or what's bad?" The horse soon returns and brings back with him 12 wild horses, so 12 additional horses. The friend, the farmer's friend returns and congratulates him on his greatly improved fortune. The farmer simply says, "Who knows what's good or what's bad?" The farmer's son then soon start, soon starts to train the wild horses. He's thrown from a horse and badly breaks his leg. The friend again returns to help the farmer and tell him how sorry he, he is to hear of his son's misfortune. The farmer simply says, "Who knows what's good or what's bad?" A war then breaks out, and the army rounds up all the able-bodied young men to go to war. The farmer's son is spared because of his broken leg. Who knows what's good or what's bad? If you find yourself really perseverating on something difficult, something that seems like it didn't go your way, you know, a, a bad experience, bad luck, a bad life, ask yourself, "Who really knows what's good or what's bad?" So you can start to ask yourself, is there any other way that this could be interpreted, this thing that happened to me or this thing that's happening to me? What are all the possible ways that this could be looked at? Is there any possible way that this could actually be making me better? So let's just go through a few kind of generalized examples. Perhaps an unexpected divorce could actually be the starting line for a whole new and exciting life. Maybe a rejection letter could lead you to moving to a location where you meet some wonderful new people, the love of your life, where you have your dream job. Maybe a diagnosis brings your whole family really together in a close-knit fashion. Alternatively, maybe you get your dream job, the thing you really, really hoped to get, and it results in overwork, burnout, and total loneliness. Or you learn the person that you've really envied for years for their picture-perfect life behind the scenes was actually in a really difficult situation. Who knows what's good or what's bad? It can be really easy to see this in our kids when they, when they have these really intense desires for something, and then they have this intense emotional reaction when it doesn't happen. So, you know, our little kids don't get the teacher they want, or a certain friend can't come to their birthday party, or, you know, they, there's something that they intensely want to get and they just can't get it. But you can see kinda from a mile away that this is all gonna be okay. You know? They end up loving the other teacher that they didn't even know about, or they make a new friend at this party that they learn a lot from and that they, they tend to do things with after that. You can kinda see that this is all gonna be okay, and in some ways, this is, hey, this is actually better. It's a lot harder, though, to have this insight about ourselves, both in hindsight or in real time. But you can start to apply these same just observations to yourself. Like, how often do we get really tied up in wanting the weather to go just as we want it, or a day at work to go just according to our plans? But what happens when it rains on the day of your race or your marathon? Or what happens when you show up to work and several of your coworkers are out sick? How is this working for me? How is this actually gonna improve my performance? How is this gonna make me grow? How is this gonna give me some surprising thing that I didn't anticipate that is actually kinda good? I heard Arianna Huffington a few years ago interviewed by Oprah, and I loved this phrase. I've never forgotten it. So she says when she's faced with a less than ideal situation, she always asks herself this question, "How is this working for me?" And since that time years ago, I have used that question so many times, and it, it makes you kinda start to creatively think about all the positive possibilities that could come from this thing. How is this working for me? This is also one of the core philosophies of author and life coach Tony Robbins. So he says, "Life is happening for us, not to us." He often talks about his chaotic childhood. He had, he had quite an abusive mother, and this quote is quite amazing. He says, "I blame her for all the beauty in my life. I blame her for the capacity to feel and care. I blame her for my insatiable hunger to end suffering, because I suffered a ton. If she had been the mother I had wanted, I would not be the man I am proud to be." Think about that. If she had been the mother I had wanted, I would not be the man I am proud to be. We can also, when, when thinking about this and trying to come up with alternative ways to see how this is working for us, we can also refer back to the self-coaching model that we talked about in the first couple of episodes. So remember that everything in our lives can be separated into five categories, the circumstances, which are the bare bones facts of what's happening, our thought about it, the feeling in our bodies that occur along with those thoughts, the actions in our life. These are the things we do or do not do or do or do not say, and then that all leads to an overall result in our life. So remember that each one of us has our own unique thoughts and feelings in reaction to the same set of facts, okay? So you're gonna break down this negative situation that you're perseverating about, that you just keep feeling sorry for yourself about, this negative thing, into its most base facts. What is the actual fact? What actually happened? And then you're gonna ask yourself, what am I making this mean? What else could I think about this same circumstance? How might this be working for me? What's a possible positive thing that come, can come from this? You can also ask yourself, is this actually true? Now, in a future episode, we're gonna get into something called The Work by Byron Katie, where, where we'll go through this in detail. But as part of that thing that she calls The Work, she recommends questioning your interpretation of events or your thought that you're stuck on by saying, "Is that true? No, really, do you really know that that's true?" And almost always you end up saying to yourself, "No, I don't, I don't know that that's true. That's not actually true." You can also use these tools either retroactively or prospectively. Okay, so when something happened to you in the past, start to use these tools to think, "Well, how did that thing actually end up working out for me? How is that an example of the who knows what's good or what's bad? I thought it was gonna be terrible at the time, and actually something really great came from it." So think about a past time where you went through something very difficult, or initially it was an outcome that you didn't want, and then start to interpret it through this retrospective lens of, "You know what? I can see now how that actually all worked for me." So I'm gonna give you an example in my own life. Um, when my husband and I were first dating and, um, thinking about getting married, I was in a job that I loved. So I had-- I was within a year or two of working at this really wonderful job, and he was going through the match process to do a surgical fellowship that would be t- a two-year fellowship. And at the time, I was in Iowa, and we were really, really hoping that he would match somewhere in the Midwest so that I could stay in my job, and that we could see each other at least on weekends, if not more often. And he ended up matching in Seattle. So at the time, it was really stressful for us to go through this, like, "Is he gonna match locally? How are we gonna do this? Okay, now he matched in Seattle, and I'm in Iowa. Am I gonna go back and forth? Am I gonna, you know, keep this job, and we'll just see each other a handful of times a year? Should I quit this job that I love and get kind of an unknown job in Seattle?" And we look back on this now, so what I ended up-- what we ended up doing is getting married. I moved with him to Seattle. I got this really groovy job on an island outside of Seattle, um, that they needed a person to fill in for two years until the next person was buying the practice. It just worked out beautifully, okay? They needed a general ophthalmologist for two years. We were gonna be there for two years, and Dan and I had an amazing adventure. It was the first two years of our marriage. We went on this great adventure together. We grew a lot. We love the city of Seattle. It was so much fun, and it's almost even hard to remember that it was a stressful period leading up to that. Okay, so now let's go through something w- that might be kind of a prospective thing. So, uh, I'm, I'm a surgeon, and this is something that comes up, you know, fortunately not frequently, but it comes up where we have surgical complications So if you are a surgeon, you know this very, very well. If you're not a surgeon, you can still find something in this story for your own work or something that you do. Okay? So if something doesn't go according to plan in surgery, it is-- it can be devastating for the surgeon. Okay? So even when you know that patient is gonna do great, when they're-- when the outcome is gonna be fine, it leads to at least a week of sleepless nights, nausea, constant perseveration. It's all you can think about. You know, you're just consumed by this surgical complication. And a lot of times the thoughts that you start to have that is just constantly with you for a week or more is, "I screwed up. I'm incompetent. I'm a terrible surgeon. I did something wrong." And you have all these feelings of shame and fear and regret and even grief, definitely incompetence. You, you're having all these negative thoughts and feelings And at first, when you're going through something like this, it's actually just a good idea to just allow all the thoughts and feelings. Just allow it. Just process those emotions. Just say, "Okay, this is shame. I'm gonna have a day of shame here. I'm just gonna let this happen." But over time, when you start to come around the dark side of the moon, you can start to ask yourself, "Okay, what are the actual facts here? What actually happened?" And go through and really even write down or watch surgical videos and name the exact step in the surgery, that exact fact, the s- the circumstance that occurred, and go through each step that you were doing that led up to this, each step that you then did after this. And ask yourself, "What am I making this fact mean?" And then you can start to switch to, "Okay, how can this make me better? What can I change? What can I think about? What can I do differently leading up to this that's gonna make me better?" And really study the surgery. Really study that part of the surgery. What, what is everything that preceded it? What is everything that happened at that moment? Do I need a different instrument? It-- Does that instrument exist? Do I need to think about some new way to do this technique? What is the lesson here? Remember, necessity is the mother of invention. It's how everything progresses in ourselves and in our world. Okay? Remember this famous quote by FDR, "A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor." Repeat that over and over, "A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor." How is this gonna make me better as a surgeon moving forward? Michael Singer says in the book Wisdom Untethered, "No matter what is happening, there is always an opportunity for growth. Maybe this experience is teaching you patience, surrender, or trust. Maybe it's showing you how much support and love are actually around you. Look for what life is giving you through this, rather than only seeing what it seems to be taking away. This shift in perspective changes everything." So to review, who knows what's good or what's bad? You know, you can start to use this with little things and big things in your life. We get really attached to how we think things should go or what we want in life. And if you don't get that, just start to say to yourself, "You know what? Who knows what's good or what's bad? How is this working for me? How might this be the best possible thing that I didn't even see coming? How will this make me better?" And remember also this question, what's the lesson? What is the lesson here? What can I take away? What nugget of wisdom can I take away from all this? So if you take one thing from this episode, it is this: don't waste a good misfortune. Use it to make yourself better. In real time, say the words, "Who knows what's good or what's bad? How is this working for me?" All right, friends, until next week, stay upright, find the good, and if you can't find the good, at least make it funny. You can find me at bethrepp.com. Email me at hello@bethrepp.com, or you can find me on my Facebook page, which is Beth Repp Coaching. And finally, the disclaimer. The content presented in this podcast is for general information only. Reliance on the information provided is done at your own risk. Until next week, everybody, I will see you next Tuesday for episode nine of Up and Not Crying.