Today I hired a cleaning lady to help me clean my house. every time I asked her to do something she said ok, then proceeded to continue to do what she was doing and ignore me. After this happened a couple of times I started to feel my body get annoyed. I thought it is perfectly understandable for me to be feeling annoyed because, this person is annoying me by not listening.

After a few minutes It occurred to me that I teach and believe that it is not the circumstance (employee not listening) that causes an emotion, it is your thinking around the circumstance that causes the emotion. Yet here I was thinking the circumstance effected me. In that moment it occurred to me to let my annoyed thinking go and allow new thought to form. Almost instantly my mood changed, for the better. But the best part of this whole experience was that I noticed the difference in the ideas in my head, when I was annoyed, and the ideas in my head when I wasn’t annoyed. When I was annoyed the ideas on how to get the lady to listen where really bad ones, for example, I thought if I raise my voice to her in a nasty way that may get her to listen, another idea, was to just let her do it her way and if things don’t get finished, they don’t get finished.

When I noticed my body was feeling stressed and anxious, that alerted me to the fact that I was in unhelpful thinking. I immediately was able to let those ideas go. when my mood rose the quality of my thoughts and ideas rose with it. I now had ideas , which said simply,  “tell her again”. Tell her until she hears you. that’s what I did.Eventually things started getting done the way I thought they should.

Any person that is having any kind of interpersonal relationships issues, weather it be marriage,  employee/ employer, friendships, siblings. the first step in changing any of these for the better, is to have understanding of how we as human beings work. The more you understand, it is not the circumstance, the more you will be able to not get distracted by your emotions. You will no longer let your emotions rule you. You will rule them. It will no longer seem like a good idea to yell at someone, or to allow some one to yell at you. You will start to become aware of what your emotions are really there to tell you. Which is simply do I want to listen and act out of the ideas in my head right now, or do I want to ignore them and wait for more helpful ones to form. From the moment you are gifted with the awareness of your emotional state, that is the moment you have the free will to choose.