Complainers — Things I Won’t Tell My Mom

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert and this week I’m going to tell you all about things I won’t admit to my mom. You see, look at this picture here. I’m not pregnant, I’ve got Covid, which kind of sucks on some levels, and I won’t tell my mom because she will blow it completely out of proportion. She’ll make it such a catastrophic event that the whole family should be worried, at nauseum, about me and of course, that’s not the case. I’ve got some mild cold symptoms, I’ve had way worse colds in the past, and I expect I’m gonna get 100% better real soon. But my mom’s kind of person who, even before Covid came, I could tell her something like, “Hey mom, I’m going on this wonderful vacation to Hawaii and I’m all excited,” and she’ll say, “Oh no dear, you know air travel is so tiring and so many germs are captured in the plane.” And she makes a really good thing sometimes not feeling quite so good. You probably know people in your life that are like that too, whether people you know personally or people you know at work. You can imagine somebody saying, “Hey, we met our quarterly sales target and all the sales people are getting bonuses this month,” and the person you’re speaking to will say, “Oh well, that’s really great but you know the sales team will be really disappointed when we don’t make the sales quotas next month.” It takes this good news and somehow finds this future forecast of something bad to worry about or complain about. So this video is a little bit about that. How do we manage complaining? How do we make the best out of the worst things? So, stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so I’ve got Covid, a sore throat, and I’m isolated. I didn’t get to play hockey and probably Covid came from playing three games of hockey last weekend, and hanging out in the locker room with people fuming their Covid viruses around. But anyway, I’ve got it and when I finish my isolation and get better, I’m looking forward to having a new level of immunity that comes from the natural exposure to the virus, which actually has some richer, more complex antigen immune boosting qualities to it. So, in some respects, it’s a good thing I’ve got Covid, it’s not serious, and I’ll get better immune system boosts from it as a result. Right, there’s the positive outlook. You know, we don’t have to turn a negative thing on its head and try to pretend it’s positive like I just did, although there was some truth to what I just said. But we have to at minimum accept what is, come to terms with reality, not resist it.

Accepting things that we don’t want, that we don’t prefer, means willingly coming to terms with reality. It’s a function of managing your state of consciousness. You know, even if I don’t want Covid, can I have a willingness to say I accept what is and I can be cheerful and engaged, and willingly engaged in the process of recovery and doing isolation and all those things, or will there be a ton of resistance the whole time I’ve got this condition? And of course, the resistance changes nothing, it just makes my life miserable in addition to having to deal with Covid. Does that make sense? We have to accept reality for what it is and willingly volunteer ourselves to be in reality. So, in the face of complaining, the first thing to do is ask for solutions. Whether you’re complaining yourself or someone’s complaining to you, “What are we going to do about it?” is the first question. You know, what are the angles? What’s the solution? What’s the approach that we’re going to take to this so that we’re working through the thing that we don’t prefer? And it may be that there’s nothing we can do, and then we work through it and we realize that conclusion, and then I accept that.

Secondly, you want to call it out. “Oh, this monologue in my brain about whatever my thing that I’m unhappy with is complaining. Oh, I see it. Okay, it’s complaining. I get it. I’m not accepting reality, I’m refusing to be okay with what is. Okay, I see it.” Or you might see it in somebody else. “Hey, you know this sounds like a lot of complaints. Is this this helpful monologue that is moving an agenda forward?” And then thirdly, we have to reduce the impact. We know lots of good science, I’ve talked about in previous videos, of the concept of neuroplasticity, that repetitive exposure to certain emotions, certain thinking processes, leads to neural networks that make that same behavior, those same emotions, more readily present. So if I’m constantly learning, practicing, tying my shoes as a five-year-old, pretty soon I can tie my shoes consistently, very, very well because I practice. Well, if I practice feeling sad, or worried, or anxious about certain things, we lay down neural networks that make those emotions more readily available to us.

And chronic complainers have done exactly that, they’ve laid down a neural network that views their entire world, their environment, and says, “Where’s the thing that’s not right for me that I can complain about?” And it has a certain set of emotions that comes with it, and a certain thinking pattern that repeats. So you have to recognize it for what it is and then try to limit its impact. And if it’s people around you who complain a lot, you need to be able to put a strong boundary in your own life to your exposure to their complaint. Does that make sense? And that may look like a million different things to a million different circumstances, but at least be aware of that, that you need to immunize yourself, if I can use that turn of phrase, from other people’s complaining. And finally, if you manage chronic complainers at work and your responsibility to oversee them, recognize what an important leadership potential opportunity that is for you.

In fact, it’s, I would say, it’s a requirement of a good leader to first begin with a complainer as a coaching thing. And if they don’t change their behaviors with coaching, then it becomes a performance management thing. And ultimately, if chronic complainers don’t turn around their behavior, then they probably shouldn’t work for you anymore. And that may sound a bit harsh, but these are the poison pills that ruin the morale in the workplace. Hey, so I’m going through the bonus period of getting a different and better kind of immune system boost from the Covid natural infection, and you should all be glad for me. Thanks for watching, click the like button, share this video with your friends and family, and maybe with your HR director too. Bye for now, see you next time.