I’ve been using this new floss lately that rips every… single… time.
It’s so incredibly frustrating.
At first, my thinking was that it was me… and that it was I who needed to treat the floss more nicely.
After all, floss is supposed to be designed specifically not to rip, eh?
Welp, not this floss.
…Must’ve missed that kind of important step in the design process.
Fast forward a few more flosses and ripping became the unavoidable pattern—regardless of how careful I was in navigating the crowded spaces between my teeth.
My first attempt to make this awful experience less awful was to treat it like a game: will today be the day I make it all the way through my mouth without a single rip?!
And once I realized that game was impossible to win, rather than revert back to pure frustration… I came up with another idea… one that’s been working ever since:
I started expecting it to happen.
Which, doesn’t sound like a revolutionary mindset change, but here’s what it did:
- It evaporated my frustration because I was no longer surprised.
- It gave me the new strategy of starting off with extra long pieces of floss so I could finish without having to re-pull and re-wrap my fingers (sometimes multiple times).
- Which, by and by, allowed me to get the job done in less time.
If there’s a similar situation in your life that, no matter what you do or how you do it, it still seems to result in the same incredibly frustrating outcome…
Maybe simply expecting it to happen… and planning for that… is an option worth exploring moving forward?