How to Take the Good out of the Bad Days

Some days are better than others. Some are absolutely super fantastic while some others are average. Then there are those days which start and end with a totally wrong beat and we wish we would have stayed in bed and skipped it completely.

“No thanks, I’ll take the other one!”

And that’s the thing – when we have a ‘bad’ day and finally the dark clouds disappear in the distance at the end of the day, we take a long sigh and shut it behind as something which should have never happened.

“Good ridden to bad rubbish, you uninvited guest! Don’t come back again!”

In retrospect, we think of bad days as unpleasant and hopefully fleeting memories which eventually get lost in some remote and distant cluster of neurons.

But we all have bad days and no matter how hard we wish otherwise, we will always have them. It’s a fact of life.

As I was driving back home today, after a ‘bad’ day at work (or so I rated it), I was thinking about the question: “If bad days are unavoidable, how can we make best use of them, if at all?”

Is there and other side to bad days than just a torn page in our life diary?

Considering that there must be a large number of bad days throughout a lifetime, then we ought to make better judgment of them  and see how we can work them out so as to squeeze some juice out of them.

There is no traction without friction:

I suddenly realized this as I was asking the question on my way from work.

Yes it was a rough day. I had strong clashes of ideas, a set of unproductive long meetings, arguments with a person or two and a host of other problems on my desk.

I did feel washed out, a bit on the down side, mentally fatigued and a bit distraught but then a feeling of strength, recovery and newly found balanced came over me.

More than that, I funnily felt that I actually needed it. I needed that friction, that opposing force to give me traction and move forward.

If life was all rosy and sweet comfort, you end up spinning your wheels on soap after a while. You need resistance to grow. End of story.

Sharpening your tools:

Or as Stephen R. Covey would put it: “Sharpening the saw”. This is related to the previous point. Bad days help to keep us in continuous feedback and in a position to reinvent ourselves, adapt and reorient our beliefs and perspective.

Problems challenge our beliefs and way of life by making us rethink our strategies, re-focus our priorities and find new creative ways to solve them.

They help us sharpen our mental tools.

Keeping you in perspective:

Stress, tension and anxiety can make us lose our perspective if we let problems overwhelm us. But if we respond in the right way to bad situations, we reinforce ourselves and learn to keep the right perspective on things in the long run.

It’s an invaluable lesson. One which leads us to maturity and self-mastery.

Keeping perspective means not to loose your head over mundane problems. To ask objectively what and where is the cause of the problem and calmly figure out how to systematically solve it and prevent it next time round.