How to Win when you Lose

Life never goes as planned, but when something goes wrong, you can bounce back with the right tools. 

We’ve all been through those heart-breaking, gutwrenching, life-changing events, and each time, the pain is fresh. So wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way to cope and overcome these traumatic experiences?

Having a grieving period when you experience any kind of loss is perfectly normal – healthy even. But it can be all too easy to sink into a cycle of self-doubt. Misery loves company, and we all know that strange feeling of comfort that can be found in self-pity, even when you’re desperately trying to pull yourself together.

Generic advice to just “move on” and “snap out of it” never works – you’d obviously stop feeling this way if you could. Fortunately, there’s a more constructive way to speed up the recovery process, and it starts with getting acquainted with the so-called Three P’s of Trauma: Personalisation, Pervasiveness, and Permanence.

These are the key factors that can stunt a person’s ability to get over disappointment. Recently, COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg documented her experience overcoming them in her memoir Option B. If you can learn to work your way out of the the Ps, you might be able to start feeling better sooner. 

In <b>2015</b>, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg suddenly lost her husband. While it devastated her, she transformed her grief into something she hopes will inspire others.

In <b>1985</b>, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple. Decades later, he said it was the best thing that happened to him.

Personalisation

According to Sheryl, “This is the lesson that not everything that happens [to] us happens [because of ] us.” We always wonder why things happen the way they do. And when there is no apparent cause, we often end up blaming ourselves, wondering what we did to deserve this.

-Dealing with it

In some cases, our actions have little bearing on the bad outcome, but it’s hard to see it this way. Jen* was madly in love and was blindsided when her boyfriend cheated on her and left her for another girl. “I was so confused, and my emotions were all over the place,” she says. “I felt like if I had been a better girlfriend then I wouldn’t have had to experience all this hurt.” Creating a Cause-and-effect table helped her to be more objective about the situation.

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