Stop A Bad Day: How to Deal with Daily Negative Obstacles

Isn’t it uncanny that whenever one wrong thing happens, everything else suddenly goes wrong? Starting your day with one negative obstacle can impact your whole day. But do bad things always happen in succession or does it have to do with our attitude over that one negative obstacle that ruins our day? Can we actually stop a bad day from being a bad day?

True Adversity vs Negative Obstacles

True adversity is a catastrophic external force that will forever change the way you know your life to be. It could be grief, an illness diagnosis, or maybe even divorce. Adversity is external to ours. But daily negativity out of little obstacles are something we can manage.

Daily negative obstacles are the little things that may impact us to have a bad day. With the cascading of bad things such as, spilling a cup of coffee on your shirt in the morning, forgetting your phone at home while you’re on your way to work, or dropping the kids late for school – when you think to yourself how bad this day is going, then you are set on your path to having a really negative day.

The Cascading Dominoes Impact

Each individual problem that we face – whether it’s little or big, is not actually related to one another. When we experience a cascade of problems, it’s human nature that we get annoyed or frustrated. But when these negative experiences pile up, and you compound the frustration, the negativity grows too big to handle.

How to Deal with Negative Obstacles to Stop a Bad Day

Most obstacles we face daily can be handled in such a way that does not impact our day negatively. When you face an obstacle or a problem, you can choose to have this process mindset:

  1. Acknowledge what happened.
  2. Determine how to solve it.
  3. Get the solution.

If you want to hear a practical example, you can watch the video below. But basically, the small nuisances does not need space in our mental and emotional capacity. We have limited capacity for our mental and emotional spaces throughout a 24-hour period. If we spend our mind space to those little nuisances, we take time and space away from our opportunities to process what truly matters.

It’s best to use your mental and emotional capacity for better things.

When you have an obstacle, address, process, solve, then move forward.

Video Timestamp

0:00-0:37 Introduction
0:38-1:40 Married My Mom, Birthed a Dog Book
1:41-3:17  What’s our topic for Lockdown Lift Up and Wildcard Wednesday?
3:18-10:02 Do bad things happen in succession or is it our attitude that causes more bad things?
10:03-13:52 How to Treat Each Individual Obstacle as an Isolated Incident
13:53-17:34 My Story
17:35-18:55 Closing

Allison Graham headshot smiling leaning against a grey wall, blue cardigan and white top

Welcome! I'm Allison Graham

Let’s face it – life is tough enough without having behaviour patterns that make life harder than it needs to be! 

That’s why I’m obsessed with finding ways to make the human experience easier by offering strategies for problem solving, dealing with chronic pain, leveraging empowering stress, and stopping patterns that create destructive stress. 

I hope you find huge value in my content. To go deeper please check out my online courses, coaching, and keynote speeches