Recently, I found myself on the receiving end of someone else’s frustration.

They had an encounter with another person that had left them frustrated, angry and upset. And when they met me that frustration found a target.

Now, logically, I knew it had nothing to do with me.

The logical side of my brain was able to immediately recognise that person wasn’t really reacting to me. I just happened to be the person standing in front of them as all those emotions bubbled to the surface.

But my emotional side did not get the memo.

And so for the next couple of hours, I replayed the interaction, over and over in my head.

What had I said?

Did I say something wrong?

Are they mad at me?

I allowed the interaction to infiltrate my mood, my thoughts, my energy. I carried it with me long after the conversation had ended.

I didn’t take my frustration out on the next person I met but I did allow someone elses emotions to effect my day.

Then I stopped. I took a deep breath. And I asked myself, what is really going on here??

Because the truth is, we are all going to have shitty days.

We are all going to experience things we didn’t plan for. We will have difficult conversations. We will encounter people who are rude, impatient or simply having a bad day themselves.

We might receive a bad review.

We might be criticised by a boss or colleague.

Someone might speak to us in a way we don’t deserve, we don’t get to control any of that. 

But we do get to decide what happens next.

Your reaction becomes your experience.

Think about how quickly one negative interaction can change the course of a day.

Someone cuts you off in traffic.

You arrive at work already, irritated.

A colleague says something that rubs you up the wrong way.

You carry that irritation into your next meeting. 

Then you go home and snap at your partner and your partner reacts.

And suddenly, one frustrating moment has somehow become an entire frustrating day, not because every moment of that day was bad, but because the emotion from one moment was carried into the next.

Our reactions can become the lens through which we experience everything that comes afterwards. We can’t control other people’s behaviour. We can’t control whether someone is having a bad day. We can’t control how someone speaks to us, whether they misunderstand us, criticise us or projects their own frustration onto us, but we can control what we do with what they give us, and that doesn’t mean pretending we’re not angry. 

It doesn’t mean suppressing our feelings and telling ourselves that something didn’t bother us when it did.

It means noticing what’s happening.

Taking a pause, creating a little space between what happened and what we choose to do next because there is a difference between feeling an emotion and allowing that emotion to take over.

The frustration ended with me. 

Looking back at that interaction, I realised something.

The person I met was already carrying frustration from somewhere else. They hadn’t dealt with it before they encountered me and so I became the next place for it to land.

And I could have passed it on.

I could have taken that frustration, carried it into my next interaction and unknowingly made someone else the target.

 And then they could have done the same and that’s how it spreads.

But it doesn’t have to.

I could choose not to take it personally, I could acknowledge that it had affected me without allowing it to define the rest of my day. I could decide that I’m not going to give that interaction anymore of my time, energy or headspace, and in doing that, something shifted.

The frustration ended with me. 

I don’t have control over the other person’s behaviour.

I don’t have to understand why they reacted the way they did.

I don’t even have to agree with them.

I simply have to decide, what I am going to do next?

So, how frustrated can I make you feel?

It’s an interesting question, because sometimes we give other people far more power over our emotional state than we realise.

Someone else’s words can stay in our heads for hours. Someone else’s opinion can change how we see ourselves. Someone else’s bad mood can become our bad mood.

But perhaps the more useful question isn’t, why do they make me feel like this?

Perhaps it’s what am I going to do with how I feel now?

There’s power in that question, because we may not get to choose what happens to us, but we can learn to choose what happens next.

And sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do is simply refuse to pass it on,

Let the frustration end with you.