Episode 115: When You’re Feeling Frustrated

You’re listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast, Episode 115. Today, we’re talking all about what to do when you feel frustrated. You ready? Let’s go.

Welcome to The Less Stressed Lawyer, the only podcast that teaches you how to manage your mind so you can live a life with less stress and far more fulfillment. If you’re a lawyer who’s over the overwhelm and tired of trying to hustle your way to happiness, you’re in the right place. Now, here’s your host, lawyer turned life coach Olivia Vizachero.

Hello, hello, hello. How are you? Long time no talk. I have been doing so many things over here, some for fun, some for work, but I am so excited to get back to talking to you and coming through your speakers. Whether you’re listening in the car or listening through your headphones, taking me with you on a walk, whatever it is, I’m so excited to get the opportunity to chat with you again every week. 

So to fill you in on what I’ve been up to since the last time I spoke to you. I took the most fabulous trip to Italy. I was gone for a couple of weeks in Italy with a group of friends, and I cannot tell you how perfect of a trip this was. 

We bopped all around Italy, but mostly spent time in Rome, Positano, and Ischia. Ischia was new for me. We really got to lounge and relax in tranquillity at the most amazing resort. And then our time in Rome was just absolutely incredible. We had the best time on the Amalfi Coast as well.

I just got to spend so much time with some of my closest friends, talking about life, talking about business. These are friends I actually met in a group coaching program. So if you’re thinking about joining a group coaching program, like either of the ones that I run, this is a little push and incentive to get you into a space where you’re surrounded by like-minded people. 

Being able to go on vacation with people who are working on the same things I’m working on, who have the same goals that I have, who share a similar way of looking at the world, it was just so delicious. 

And then, after my time in Italy, I got back, I was in Michigan for a hot second, and then I headed on down to Austin, Texas. I got to speak at ClioCon. And a lot of my clients were at ClioCon. I got to spend some juicy, amazing time with them in person and got to meet a whole host of new people as well.

If you’re tuning into the podcast for the first time because you met me at ClioCon, welcome. I’m so excited to have you here listening. And I’ve got a great episode for you this week.

So this is a framework that I came up with in a client session recently. I’ve thought about this for a while, but I hadn’t articulated it quite in the way that I’m about to articulate it for this episode. But today I want to talk about what you can do when you feel frustrated. How do you navigate your frustration? 

I want you to think about something that you might be feeling frustrated about right now. Get really clear on that in your mind. What’s the situation that you’re encountering where that frustration is coming up for you? Now the first thing you want to do when you’re feeling frustrated is just get clear as to what’s causing your frustration.

Remember, your thoughts are what cause you to feel frustrated. So check in with yourself. What are you thinking? And the reason that I want to really explore frustration today is because I want you to see why frustration is a problem and how you typically respond to it. So we’re going to walk through just creating awareness to begin with. All right?

So there’s a situation that you’re feeling frustrated about. Maybe there’s a lot of situations that you’re feeling frustrated about. I tend to find that people who feel frustrated typically feel frustrated pretty frequently. So think of one or a handful of situations that you’re experiencing frustration with right now and then get clear.

We always start by separating out the facts. What are the facts? What happened? What’s the scenario that you’re experiencing that you’re encountering right now? What did someone do or what did they say or what didn’t they do or what didn’t they say? What are the facts? Get as clear on those as you possibly can.

Then get really clear on the thoughts that you are thinking about those facts. Those are the thoughts that are making you feel frustrated. Now my guess is your thoughts are going to contain a lot of “should” thinking. “They shouldn’t be doing this. They should be handling this differently. I wouldn’t do this if I were them.” That’s a big one when we’re expecting ourselves from other people. 

“I can’t believe that they’re doing this.” That normally makes me feel a little more outraged than frustrated, but that might be what’s coming to mind for you in this situation. “It shouldn’t be happening this way. I shouldn’t have to deal with this.” That might be another thought that you’re thinking when you’re encountering this situation. But there’s probably a lot of “should” thinking coming up for you based on how you’re feeling at the moment. 

Now before you work on changing your thoughts, which is going to be something that I ask you to do in a second, I want you to see why frustration is a problem for you. The way we can see that it presents as a problem is based on how we respond when we’re feeling frustrated. What do you do when you feel frustrated? How do you show up? What’s your typical course of action when you’re feeling this way? 

I find that my clients typically dwell a lot. They end up arguing with reality, meaning they argue with the experience that they’re encountering. They argue with other people’s behavior. You focus on what other people are doing and you think that they should be doing things differently, which is what I mean by arguing with reality.

And you devote a lot of energy to wishing that the person would do something different than they are. You really do take issue with their behavior. 

You probably end up stewing a lot. Maybe you complain internally. But you’re just devoting way too much time to what another person is doing, how they’re showing up, how they’re behaving. 

You might also, in addition to dwelling and stewing and just spending time mulling it over and vacillating on it, you might also respond negatively. Maybe you react when you’re feeling frustrated and you lash out. You actually take your frustration out on other people. 

Maybe you complain to them or to other people, but probably to them. You tell them what they should do instead. You try to control their behavior. Maybe you end up giving them ultimatums or making threats. You tell them what they’re doing wrong. You argue with them. You criticize. Maybe you are mean back.

Ultimately, through all of these different actions, you end up showing up in a way that’s really not aligned with how you’d probably prefer to show up in your relationships with other people or in the exchanges that you’re dealing with day in and day out. 

And you can think about the different situations that you might be experiencing frustration in right now, all right? Maybe it’s in your professional life. Maybe you’re feeling frustrated with someone you supervise. How do you show up when you’re feeling frustrated with them? Maybe it’s with opposing counsel. How do you show up when you’re feeling frustrated with them? 

Maybe it’s with a boss or a supervisor. How do you show up when you’re feeling frustrated with them? Do you dwell on it? Do you stew? Do you vacillate? Do you spend a lot of energy? Do you take it home with you after work? Do you let it impact your personal life, this frustration? Do you take it out on them? Do you withdraw, or are you mean back? 

Do you criticize them? Are you short with them? Are you passive aggressive? How are you showing up in these moments? Does it impact how you negotiate? Do you not keep a level head? Do you make rash decisions? Do you let your temper get the best of you? Think about how you show up in these moments.

And then also think about your personal life. Who are you frustrated with right now? How do you show up in your personal relationships when you’re feeling frustrated? Do you take it out on the other person? Are you harsh with them? Do you criticize them? Do you complain? Do you nitpick? Do you nag? Are you mean back? Are you short-tempered? Are you passive aggressive? Think about how you show up. 

Is that how you want to show up in these relationships? I’m going to do a whole podcast episode specifically on how you show up in your relationships and how to show up better. But for this episode, I really want you to focus on why frustration is a problem. 

It’s because you end up not showing up and spending your time the way you want to be spending it and being intentional with your responses when you’re feeling frustrated, okay? 

So now that you can see that your frustration probably is not serving you well, what are we going to do about it? Well, like I said a moment ago, the first thing you always want to do is just check in with yourself. What am I thinking in this given situation that’s making me feel frustrated? Get clear on your thoughts. 

And can you change the way that you think? If you change the way that you think, you’ll very quickly change the way that you feel. You’ll dial down your own frustration. 

So a thought that I tend to think is that I can’t control other people’s behavior. Other people have free will. They quite literally get to do whatever it is that they want to do. Now that’s not going to make me feel overjoyed in that situation, but it is going to help me get to accepting or understanding. I might also ask myself, “I wonder why this person’s doing whatever it is that they’re doing?” 

Normally we ask that question in a rhetorical way, sort of in a snarky or a sassy way, “Why are they even doing this?” Which is not going to be very helpful to get you to shift out of your frustration. But when you can tap into sincerity, and answer that question really candidly and honestly and from the most sincere place that you can muster, you will answer that question in a much more productive manner. 

So why is this person doing whatever it is that they’ve just done? And you’ll get access to a whole host of different answers that, again, are going to help you tap into feeling more understanding, feeling more accepting, feeling more compassionate.

Now you don’t have to condone their behavior or whatever activities that they’re engaging in or whatever they’ve done or said. You don’t have to condone it, but you can exercise a little bit more compassion around their behavior when you answer, “I wonder why they did that?” And you can come up with an answer from that sincere place. 

So those are just some quick hacks to start to shift your thinking right away. Another hack, just to give you one more, is to ask yourself, “What might be a reason I would do this?” And that might be a little challenging for you if you’re really stuck in that mentality of ‘well, I would never do this.’ But if you can push yourself to really think outside the box here, you might be able to come up with a situation where you would do it too. 

So we’ll use the example of being late. Maybe someone was late to meet you and you’re feeling really frustrated about it. And you’re thinking, “Man, I would never do that to them.” Push yourself to think of an instance where you might actually be late, all right? Maybe a situation where you feel like something’s outside of your control. 

Now you might be looking at the situation thinking very much so that their situation was in their control and they could have handled it differently. But maybe they were thinking about it differently and they were actually thinking that it was outside of their control, okay? So that might give you a different perspective and help you dial down your frustration. 

But the main focus of this episode is not to talk about shifting our thinking, all right? The main focus of this episode is to help you understand your frustration at a deeper level. Because I deeply believe that our frustration is a defense mechanism, and this manifests itself in two different ways.

I want to talk about what those two different ways are so you can create some greater awareness as to why your brain might be serving you up the opportunity to feel frustrated, because it actually protects you from two different experiences. 

So the first experience is when you’re feeling frustrated, I want to challenge you to dig a little bit deeper. If you think of your frustration as a secondary emotion, and that there’s actually a more vulnerable emotional experience taking place, I want to challenge you to find that more vulnerable emotional experience.

If you can ask yourself, “What’s the most vulnerable emotion I’m experiencing at this moment? And how is my frustration protecting me from it?” So frustration, very much like anger, tends to be a response that we go to when we’re feeling a weaker negative emotion. And this doesn’t mean that you’re weak as a person. I just think of it as a softer, more vulnerable emotional experience. Something that feels a little less comfortable for us than frustration.

Not that frustration is a positive emotional experience, it’s not. But it tends to be a little bit more empowered, or empowering, because it’s a more powerful emotion to be in. Normally we feel sort of large and big and more commanding when we’re feeling frustrated than whatever vulnerable emotional experience we’re encountering in that moment.

So maybe you’re feeling dismissed and frustration is the way that you escape feeling dismissed, okay? So you feel frustrated instead of tapping into that more vulnerable emotional experience. Maybe you feel neglected or ignored or insignificant or maybe not valued or not respected, and you feel frustrated instead. It’s easier and more comfortable for you to access your frustration than to really sit in that negative, weaker emotional experience, that more vulnerable emotional experience.

Maybe you feel sad or hurt and it’s easier for you to access frustration, and to spend time feeling frustrated, than it is to access that sadness or that hurt state of being, all right? 

Maybe you also feel out of control. I know this is true for me. When I’m wishing that a situation was different, I often feel very out of control. Because I quite literally am out of control. I want someone else to behave differently and they’re not, and I don’t control that. 

I don’t love acknowledging my lack of control in a situation, because I tend to feel powerless, sort of helpless, if you will. So it’s easier and more comfortable to feel frustrated than to acknowledge my lack of control in that given moment.

Now what’s powerful about taking some time and acknowledging and accessing the more vulnerable emotional experience that’s going on for you, is that you can really just learn to sit with your negative emotion rather than indulging in feeling frustrated and then reacting unintentionally and negatively from that place of frustration. 

You can just hold space for yourself and acknowledge, “This is what’s coming up for me in this moment. This is how I’m feeling. There’s nothing wrong with this emotion. I’m allowed to sit with it and hold space for it and make room for it. I don’t have to do anything. Nothing’s required of me in response to this emotional experience. I can just let it be here. I can just sit with these feelings and acknowledge them as part of the human experience. This is how I’m feeling right now.”

I find it’s a much more effective avenue to try and shift out of the thoughts that are causing you to feel those more vulnerable emotions, but also to just embrace them. You don’t have to, when you’re working on your mindset, eliminate every negative emotion you experience. You can just hold space for the human experience and that part of the human experience involves feeling negative feelings some of the time. 

Are they caused by our thoughts? Yes. But does that mean we need to eliminate every negative emotional experience we encounter? No, we don’t have to. We can just hold space for how we’re feeling and acknowledge it and recognize we don’t really need to do anything about it. We can just let it be. 

But that gets you out of the frustration when you can acknowledge and identify the more vulnerable, the more raw emotions that are coming up for you. Okay? And just sit with them. Just let them be there.

So that’s the first thing you can do: Create deeper awareness, then sit with those emotions, and recognize you don’t need to indulge in frustration as a way to escape them. 

Notice that your frustration is protecting you from feeling those deeper, more vulnerable, more intimate negative emotions. Then recognize you don’t need to indulge in the frustration in order to escape them. You can just give yourself permission to feel them on purpose all the way through. Okay?

The second thing that I want you to be aware of is that frustration can also be a defense mechanism from doing what you need to do in order to remedy a situation. What I see with people is they will often indulge in feeling frustration because they’re in a situation where one of two things can happen. 

They can try and control another person’s behavior, which is very ineffective, right? But they’re hoping that the other person will take a different course of action, because if the other person behaves differently, then it saves them from having to do the uncomfortable thing that really is their work to do. Like setting a boundary, for instance. 

We will often take issue with another person’s behavior and think that they need to behave differently because so long as we take issue with their actions and think they need to do something differently, we don’t have to address what we need to do, the action that we need to take, which is setting a boundary, saying no, protecting ourselves. Focusing on what’s within our control and spending our attention and energy there. 

That’s the uncomfortable stuff. That’s where rubber meets the road when it comes to practicing the gag-and-go, right? You might have to feel guilty and take a particular course of action because it creates the situation that you ultimately want to create. And it’s the only way to do it within your control. Because, like I said earlier, we can’t control other people’s behavior.

It’d be amazing if we could. We simply can’t though. So you can want other people to be different, and that’s going to keep getting you a negative result. Because people aren’t going to behave differently, because we can’t control them. They’re going to do whatever it is that they want to do. And people tend to act in conformity with the way that they typically act. 

So if it’s how someone typically behaves, you can expect more of that from them. Expecting them to behave differently is sort of the definition of insanity here, right? But we’ll keep arguing with their behavior because it is a distraction from us focusing on what we really need to do, which is focus on our own behavior. Focus on what’s within our control, and then take that course of action, which, again, is uncomfortable.

Maybe you have to feel worried that they won’t respond favorably. Maybe you have to feel sad because you’re going to walk away from a particular situation. Maybe you have to feel the fear of missing out, that FOMO, by taking a particular course of action. Maybe you have to feel selfish that you’re putting yourself first and you really don’t want to do that. Or afraid that there’s going to be some negative ramification by you taking the action that’s within your control. 

So go back to that issue that you’re encountering where you’re experiencing frustration right now and check in with yourself. It could be a combination of these two things or it’s one or the other. But is your frustration protecting you from a more vulnerable emotional experience? If so, what is that? 

And can you just sit with that more vulnerable emotional experience, that more intimate emotional experience, and just let it be there? Can you create additional awareness and compassion for yourself that that’s what’s coming up for you? That that’s what’s going on? 

And then, the second leg of this, are you taking issue with someone else’s behavior? Because so long as you focus and take issue with their behavior, you really don’t have to focus on your own behavior and on doing the uncomfortable thing that’s actually within your control.

Now, is it uncomfortable to gag-and-go and do what is within your control? Yes, but it’s also more empowering to focus your energy there. So being in a state of frustration is really disempowering. You can see it’s disempowering because you don’t show up with intentionality. It’s also disempowering because you’re focusing on something that’s outside of your control.

So it will always be more empowering to focus on what is within your control. Even if it’s uncomfortable to do what’s within your control, it will be a more empowering experience moving forward for you, which is what I want for you. That’s my goal for you, by you listening to this podcast and me teaching you the things that I teach you in the course of these episodes, I want to empower you. 

And the way that we empower ourselves is to focus on what’s within our control, and to take action in furtherance of those issues, what’s within our control, putting that into practice and moving forward from that place. 

So check in: Is it the first one? Is it the second one? Is it a combination of the two? How will you navigate your frustration moving forward? Will you, number one, just allow yourself to experience those more vulnerable emotions and be at peace with them, accept them, embrace them as part of your human experience? 

Or will you recognize your frustration’s protecting you from doing the uncomfortable thing? Will you resist the urge to indulge in frustration as a defense mechanism from doing the uncomfortable thing? Will you identify what it is you need to do? 

Identify the negative emotion you need to embrace, then gag-and-go your way through it by taking that intentional action, feeling the discomfort that comes with it, and moving forward on your own terms by controlling what you control, which is always just yourself. All right? 

This is a way to really understand and navigate your frustration and move forward in a more intentional and a more healthy manner. I hope this helps you with whatever situation you’re encountering, that you’re experiencing frustration around right now. 

Go put this into practice. Make a decision on which one you will do; path one or path two, or a combination of the both. And see how it changes how you handle your frustration moving forward. This is going to be a game changer for you.

All right, my friends, that’s what I’ve got for you this week. I hope this helps you. I hope you have a beautiful week, and I will talk to you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to The Less Stressed Lawyer podcast. If you want more info about Olivia Vizachero or the show’s notes and resources from today’s episode, visit www.TheLessStressedLawyer.com.