I remember a Japanese lady working for an insurance company’s customer service. During her work she has to listen to customers’ complaints and find a solution, if possible, by phone. One day she became so stressed about her work that she could not speak on the phone. She got emotionally and physically exhausted by customers’ complaints that she had to listen to during the whole day’s work. In this case a lot of people go to a psychologist, or start taking tranquillizers or try to change jobs. She started going to the gym before her working time, which helped her become mentally fitter − more stress-tolerant and can handle the work more calmly. She said: „even if the customers’ complaints and working conditions have not changed but my approach to clients and my job has.”

There are working conditions which we may be not able to change, but we can change our attitudes and problem-solving abilities. There are enough means in life to make it better at some level even in the most hopeless situation. It depends on us how we can find and apply them properly.

Practical tasks

Look at your life to see whether you have a challenge that you cannot solve, but would like to go beyond it. If you cannot change the given thing by yourself, how can you change your attitude to the problem?

Meditate on the following:

Due to human nature most people have similar problems (family problems, workplace problems, environmental problems, financial problems, health problems, relationship problems arising from partnership), but all of them consider their own problems as the biggest one. We can only solve problems that are relatively unchangeable if our presence does not support the problems or we change our attitudes to the problems.