Frustration: the feeling of being annoyed or less confident because you cannot achieve what you want.
Ahh, frustration. It’s a universal human experience – in fact, many animals experience it too. So it won't surprise you to hear that it has a purpose.
What is frustration for?
Frustration alerts us that something inconvenient, surprising or annoying has happened. When things aren’t going as planned or desired, we need to act. While frustration is an effective warning system, it’s less effective at guiding us to make sound decisions.
To allow frustration to do its job properly, we must learn to identify it and then use it to trigger a conscious effort to become curious.
Curiosity: an eager wish to know or learn about something.
Think about it. When we’re frustrated, we often use phrases like:
- “How could they do such a thing?”
- “What were they thinking?”
- “I just don’t understand!”
- “Why is this happening to me?”
The answers we’re looking for would be offered more enthusiastically if we said:
- “What was the rationale behind that decision?”
- “What was your thought process there?”
- “Help me understand.”
- “What caused this situation, and how do other people avoid it?”
Sources of frustration
It also pays to think more deeply about the things that make us frustrated. Many of them have a perfectly justifiable root cause if you dive deep enough. For example:
- Traffic jams might be caused by a car accident.
- Someone making a lot of mistakes might be learning something new.
- Someone using the wrong words might be communicating in a second (or third, or fourth…) language, or have a disability.
These are all perfectly fair explanations for the sources of your angst. And perfectly unfair things to complain about to the person in question.
So sure: feel frustrated! You aren’t immune to it, and it does suck when things are more difficult than they need to be. But feel that frustration, name it – and transform it into curiosity.
When you’re dealing with situations where you have an enduring relationship with the offending party, this can be a fantastic trick. Not only does it reduce your negative feelings, it can make other people like you more.
Curiosity in action
This all sounds very idealistic and nice in theory; let’s try some examples.
First up, imagine a situation where you're talking to someone with wildly different views to you. Perhaps they're politically incompatible, or they prioritise efficiency above all else while you like to take time over your craft. Maybe you love data and metrics and they believe that progress can't truly be measured.
It doesn't matter who is right or wrong, as you're both entitled to hold your own opinions. And you've got to work together. In some cases, the person who holds your career progression in their hands may be so totally different to you that you find yourself frustrated in every conversation.
So what do you do? Ask some questions! Start by asking them to yourself. Then – when you're less frustrated – you'll have a better idea of what to ask them.
- Why do they feel that way?
- What life experiences have led them to hold such different views?
- What would the middle ground between what they believe and what you believe look like?
- What can we both agree on?
With this framing, you're no longer fighting against their views. You're learning to understand them and work with them.
Sometimes, it will be the other party's actions that wind you up, not their words.
Say someone is late delivering some stats you need for a presentation. What starts off as:
“Oh great, now their mistake is going to make me look like an idiot! What else were they doing that was so important?”
Can become:
“That's a pretty big oversight on their part. I wonder what they were doing instead?”
Ask them this - but with curiosity, rather than frustration. Perhaps they had something even more important come up, or they were distracted by something else going on in their life.
The fantastic thing about asking with curiosity is that it trumps the frustrated line of questioning every time. If they had a genuine reason for not completing the work, you don’t look like a jerk for having a go at them. And if they’re just being lazy or dismissive, you don’t give them the opportunity to flip the script and paint themselves as a victim.
And let’s face it, most people aren’t going to let you down on purpose, most of the time.
How to be curious
Here’s how to reliably incorporate more curiosity into your life:
- Learn what frustration feels like to you.
- Practise spotting when you are growing frustrated.
- When it happens, label the feeling and actively look for questions you can ask to help you make a good decision about how to proceed.
- After the situation is over, consider the difference between how you wanted to act when you were frustrated vs how you did act when curious. Do you think the outcome was better?
Curiosity is a fantastic way to approach almost any situation. Meeting someone new? Be curious about them! Struggling with a problem? Be more curious! Feeling something negative? Explore it, with curiosity.
It isn’t easy, however. Anything that involves overriding your innate responses requires conscious effort and practise. So one final tip: set yourself ‘reminders to be curious’.
And if you find yourself not practising, ask yourself why (with curiosity!).
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