In today’s video I want to share with you how to become a no complaint person. I know that sounds really easy, but as we’ll see, it’s really not. I’m going to share with you how to do that.
In order to get any change in our life, we’ve got to focus on things that we can do every single day, because it’s things we do every single day that create our habits. Make those changes every day can make a big difference.
Now, complaining is something we’re all guilty of doing. We complain about the weather. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. We complain about traffic or travel, the airline, or the train was late again.
We complain about one another, family members, friends and co workers! We can literally complain about anything and everything. In fact, we even complain about our bed, don’t we? We say. “I got out on the wrong side of the bed this morning.” So it’s the bed’s fault that I’m a bit grouchy today. We’re brilliant at it.
Why is it important that we look at complaining? Well we think, feel, speak and act. The way we act causes what and us to think and feel, so we then speak and act, which affects the way that we think and feel, which affects what we speak we act.
We can get ourselves into a bit of a negative spiral here. This is what complaining basically does.
Let me define what I mean by complaining.
A complaint is any time I’m with somebody and I verbalize a discomfort or a dislike and, one, the person I’m doing that to can’t do anything about it, can’t change it or, two, I don’t offer a solution or take action to move it forward.
Then it’s a complaint. I’ll give you an example. My wife and I went for a coffee a little while ago. It was a new waitress. She delivered the coffee. It all looked good until we tasted it and we realized actually it’s cold. It’s not even warm and we like it really hot.
I went in to the café and said, “This is cold, and we’d like it hotter please. Can you warm it up? Just take this and really warm it up.”
Why is that not a complaint?
Because the person I’m speaking to can actually do something about it. What would’ve been a complaint is if we would’ve sat at the table together and said, “Oh, that waitress, she’s hopeless, isn’t she? She’s obviously new. She hasn’t got a clue what she’s doing. I mean, how could she deliver a cold coffee? Everyone knows that coffee’s supposed to be at least warm, right”? And then did nothing about it. That’s a complaint.
All of us are somewhere on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum is the Complainer the true hard core complainer, the energy vampire, the mood hoover, the person that can suck energy out of a conversation. You bump into them, they go, “How’s it going”? You go, “It’s going great.” They go, “Well, that won’t last.”
At the other end of the spectrum, is the Aimer, the person that’s more proactive, that’s more solution oriented, that’s always taking action toward making something better.
All of us are somewhere on this spectrum here. My first question to you is, “Where is your resting position? Because some days you’re probably more at the complainer end and some days you’re probably more at the aimer end. But we all have a resting position.
Where’s yours?
I’ll bet you don’t know. How do I say that? Well, here’s why because complaining is a socially accepted thing to do. In fact, if we bump into someone that doesn’t like to complain, then they’re weird, right? It’s the norm. It’s just normal to complain. Often we don’t realize how often we do it, and I’m going to come back to this….
