“I get up to that start line and my heart is pounding so hard I think I’m going to have a heart attack,” Andrea tells me. “I can barely remember the course or what I’m supposed to do out there.”

Andrea, my partner, loves to do agility sports with her dog, Georgia. But she experiences competition anxiety like many people do. It tends to interfere with her ability to run the course smoothly and make split-second decisions on how to guide Georgia most efficiently to the finish line.

Similarly, some of my clients tell me that they don’t know how to handle their intense emotions of frustration, sadness, anger, or a whole host of other feelings.

Should you try to get rid of a negative emotion?

Both Andrea and my clients spend a lot of time and energy developing ways to make the feelings go away. Andrea tries taking deep breaths. A client might try avoiding thinking about the frustrating situation she is experiencing.

These are not bad ideas and they certainly are not going to hurt anything. (I, of course, am especially fond of the deep breathing idea!)

However, the root of the problem lies in trying to get rid of the emotion altogether.

My advice?

Don’t buy into the emotion.

Ever feel like you can’t take it anymore?

There is an essential resiliency skill that will help you not only take it, but bounce back from the really tough emotional times in your life. It has to do with perspective.

Let me illustrate by telling the following story.

A top girls’ school in London is currently engaging in an interesting experiment: Failure Week.

This entire week will be about failure and about “the value of having a go rather than playing it safe and perhaps achieving less.”

I love this. Here’s why: We need to become friends with failure in order to be able to bounce back in life.

Even though there is lip service paid to “it’s okay to fail,” the reality is that there is subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to do exactly the opposite – to be perfect.

The next message is always right where you are. ~ Ram Dass

I was sitting on the patio at Starbuck’s the other day passing time before I met a friend for lunch. I had a book with me and was trying to read it but, to tell the truth, my mood was down and I felt distracted from reading by my inner melancholy.

Having lived with depression for a long time, my mind resorted to its gamut of self-recriminations: “You shouldn’t be feeling this way.” “Everything is fine, just stop it.” “You get gloomy too often for no good reason.”

Finally, I caught myself, took a breath to let go of the negative thoughts, and went back to my book and mocha. A flash of pink caught my eye as the patio door opened in front of my table.

Let’s expand a little bit on the idea of acceptance that I wrote about in a recent post. In that article, I talked about how important it is to accept the reality of the adversity you may be facing.

Now let’s talk about the aspect of acceptance that has to do with letting go. Many times when I talk about letting go, I can see people’s eyes start to roll back in their heads.

“Oh great, I’ve fought and fought to keep my house from going into foreclosure, and now she wants me to give up?”

Herein lies the common misunderstanding: letting go is not so much about giving up as it is about giving in. It’s not about just standing by, doing nothing, as your house goes into foreclosure. But it is about giving in to the reality of your current situation and letting go of judgments and expectations you might have about the outcome.

Your boss calls you into his office. Smiling, you take a seat. You’re sure that long-awaited promotion is finally here and your heart races with excitement.

Instead, your boss sighs, shakes his head, and says, “I have to tell you something.”

Suddenly, your excitement turns to dread.

“I’m sorry,” he says slowly, “but we’re going to have to lay you off.”

How do you get through this kind of shock and loss?

Resilience: The Beginning

Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith sifted through the mounds of data from their longitudinal study and noticed something peculiar. Of the children born on Kauai in 1955, there were a group of them that were at high risk for doing poorly as they grew older.

It wasn’t this group that caught the attention of the researchers, though. It was a subset of this group. The subset, about thirty-percent of the high-risk kids, was doing well. Really well.

They checked the data again. Yes, all of the high-risk children were facing the same types of adversity: parental issues including low education, behavioral health issues, and discord; health problems; poverty. And yet some of the children did very well while others did not.

Why?