“Spending today complaining about yesterday won’t make tomorrow any better.” -unknown
Nothing in life goes perfect for any of us, which means we can always find plenty of things to complain about. In fact, I’m fairly certain that most of us could fill our days complaining about things that have gone wrong in our lives if we chose to. We could complain about the traffic, the weather, not having enough time in the day, not making enough money, not liking a boss, not making a sale, not getting the job…the list could go on forever.
Yet, if we were asked to produce a list of solutions that might change an undesirable circumstance to something better, the word “complain” would certainly not qualify as one of them. Why? Because complaining will never make any circumstance better!
All complaining results in is focusing our own attention on negativity and then spreading that negativity to anyone within earshot of our complaints. It also drains both our energy and our desire to actually get up and fix what’s wrong. We end up a victim of our own self-centered pity party, and if we complain enough we will find ourselves at a pity party of one because NOBODY enjoys being around a serial complainer.
Complaining isn’t going to change what happened, nor will it expand the list of options we have ahead of us. So why do it?
None of us can change what happened yesterday because it has already happened. So what we are left to do is to deal with the consequences of whatever happened the best we can. If we made a mistake that caused a problem, there is really only one course of action that will make it better: We can own up to it, do our best to fix it (when possible), learn from it, implement the necessary changes to prevent it from reoccurring, and then move forward. That’s it. That is the most we can do. And when things go wrong due to no fault of our own, all we can do is accept the way things are, learn what we can from the experience, and move forward believing better things lie ahead.
What we shouldn’t do is complain. Complaining a complete waste of time. And complaining certainly doesn’t make us feel better. It causes us to dwell in the past and it prevents us from being able to move forward.
“What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.” – Maya Angelou
One important distinction to be made here is the difference between complaining and suggesting ideas for improvement (or what some might refer to as constructive criticism). It’s great to suggest ways to make things better, but if they start with “You/we should have done ____” it comes off as a complaint. A better way to phrase it would be to say, “I think what you/we learned is that the next time we have this situation we will try ____.” The first phrase was dwelling on the past, whereas the second phrase is looking toward the future. It’s amazing how a simple change of wording can make all the difference in the message being relayed.
At the end of the day what we all want is to be happy. I think Randy Pausch describes in best in his talk “The Last Lecture” when he says: “If you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out... Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.”
What will make us happy is feeling grateful for the lessons we have learned from the past, while staying firmly focused on moving ourselves forward into the future. Having that attitude, more than anything else, will give us our best tomorrow.
~Amy Rees Anderson (follow my daily blogs at www.amyreesanderson.com/blog )
