Political Warfare Bureau,M.N.D.PostDate: 2017/05/01

You are the only one who can decide to be happy or not

No matter how much worse the situation gets, train yourself to learn the precious lessons.

By Qiu Weihao, first lieutenant, Medical Company, Second Battalion, 5th Regional Support Commander Hygiene Group, CLC

The managers of business should frequently ask themselves “What have we done right?”, “What different strategies or methods we can take next time?”  Not every trial can be successful the first time.  The above questions are helpful to us for finding the most valuable information in different situations.  Every experience is a kind of learning, and provides us chances for improvement and success.  

Make “immediate reflection” part of your daily habits.  No matter how bad situations get, you can train yourself to learn precious and positive lessons from them.  If you use reflective thinking and brainstorming (forcing yourself to hammer out twenty resolutions) at the same time, you will be impressed by the unexpected amount of ideas and conceptions; at the same time, these techniques will make you one of the leading people.

Thomas Alva Edison, the greatest inventor in the whole world, said that the experiment was just a process of excluding mistakes.  Therefore, he kept records of all experiments.  When Edison decided to undertake a certain invention, he would concentrate on ruling out any infeasible plans till he found the working one.  That was why he became the greatest inventor in history and is a model for us all.  Henry Ford said that failures are methods for us to get a re-start.  From now on, shrugging your shoulders, you should regard every failure as a learning experience; when you fail in anything you are one step closer to success.

Negative sentiments naturally occur when people experience failures or disappointments, which seem to punch people in the temples with pain, disappointment and frustration.  Sometimes, even giving up is a normal and natural reflection of people going through frustration.  But the question is how long the feeling lasts.  When mental health is being evaluated, the standards are determined by the recovery time from disappointments.  Of course, frustrations hurt people.  However, how much time you take to recover is the key point.  If you have assessed the  probability of failure in advance, and are mentally prepared to accept failures, you will recover from frustrations faster.  The speed of affective recovery is controlled by the conception of issue rather than the issue itself.  You can decide which way to interpret the issue yourself. 

There are several positive and powerful self-dialogues that may enable you to mentally control yourself, and to moderate your negative feelings and emotions.  Tell yourself that you have to be responsible for these things when you face difficulties.  It is normal for regular people to get angry and upset, and to complain or find excuses when they are confronted with frustrations.  It is not at all helpful for solving problems.  On the other hand, when we say to ourselves “I’m responsible for this,” we stop complaining and terminate the sources of negative sentiments, such as disappointment, anger, and frustration.  At the same time, we become able to think calmly, and figure out the best solution.  Thus we can not only minimize the loss but also learn many precious lessons. 

If we separate the meanings of issues from our emotions, our sentiments will not be trammeled by them.  We can refuse to be sentimental, and change the interpretation of events and terminate the impact of events by controlling our conceptions. After all, you are the only one who can decide to be happy or not.

The article is extracted from Page 3 of Youth Daily News on 12 December 2006.