By: Rachel Rofehttp://www.RachelRofe.com

Today's episode is all about when tough things happen to you. Tough things happen to everybody. It's just a part of life.

While we don't always have a choice of things happening to us that we don't automatically love, we do have a choice in how we respond to them. That's what this podcast is about today.

We're going to go over several different ways where you can take a negative that happens in your life and flip it into a positive. You know the premise of this podcast is, if you have a choice, choose a better life.

I want to give you ways to be equipped so that you can actually do that, choose a better life and have tools in your tool belts of choice.

We're going to go through several different ways and just listen for whatever would work the best for you. I'll have 10 different ways. Some of these might not speak to you. Some of them might.

Maybe you feel anger or misery or upset whatever it is, and just funnel it into something else.

Maybe you get really mad at your boss and you turn that into a great workout or you turn it into cleaning your kitchen. Many of the greatest pieces of arts, the greatest songs, they're fueled from heartbreak and negative emotions.

Taylor Swift comes to mind when I talk about this. Her whole career was started because she had terrible experiences with ex boyfriends and she wrote songs about them.

There are so many amazing masterpieces that have been created from people who had a bad experience with something, and they fuel that energy into something else. I'm not saying not to feel your feelings. Feel your feelings but I don't want you to wallow in them. I want you to feel whatever you're feeling and then instead of repeating the story of why you're not feeling good over and over and over, just fuel it into something else and funnel it into something that actually brings you fulfillment.

When people would look at the books on their Kindle reader, it would just look really weird and it'd be very hard to read. I was getting all these negative reviews. My sales were going down. I obviously didn't feel proud of what I was turning in, but I didn't know how to fix it because I tried a million times and I'm not tech savvy at all, so just driving me crazy.

I ended up working with a programmer and actually had him create a software for me where basically, we would take different books, put it into the software and then, the books would end up coming out Kindle formatted perfectly. We would post them to Kindle and everything would be great.

That program was called Kinstant Formatter and it actually came out in 2010. It's now 2014, and we'd still sell every single day. I ended up deciding to sell this offer. We still sell a copy every single day years and years later because this is such a problem for so many people.

Why I bring this up is because, if something's happening in your life that is driving you crazy, then look to see how you can find a solution because maybe it's something that you can offer as a product or a service.

Maybe it's something that has to do with your life purpose. Maybe it's even just something that you can help others with in a big way. Maybe this is a lesson you can pass down to your children or tell your friends about it, tell other people who have dealt with the same thing. This could be something that you can really help a lot of people with.

When I say that, I mean think about it and think, "Is this going to matter to me in a year? Is it going to matter to me in a month? Will it even matter to me in a week or by tomorrow?“

Because a lot of times, it won't. A lot of times, something happens and then it's really not that big of a deal but because it's in that moment, it looks like a bigger deal. Just try to step out of it for a second.

Going even further into the perspective thing, you can also think about how much worse whatever is happening could be but it isn't. For example, let's say you get mad at your child. You can think...if it works for you. This doesn't work for everybody but, you can think like, "At least I have a child. It would be so much worse if something happened to her or him," something like that.

If you get in trouble at work or something, it could be, "What'd happen if I wouldn't even have a job? What would happen then?" Either of those things could help just give you more perspective on what's the magnitude of whatever you're upset about really is.

If you always felt just awesome, you wouldn't really know that awesome felt awesome, it would just feel regular for you.

Sometimes, if less than stellar things happen, it actually helps give you perspective. Sometimes, I'll tell myself if I feel like I'm having a breakdown in something that I'm breaking down so that I can break through. I'll look at it as a chance to open up more amazingness in my life because I'm really feeling whatever I'm feeling that's not so good.

Maybe something's really bothering you and you can use this as an opportunity to be vulnerable and ask somebody for help.

It'd be a great opportunity to get to know somebody better. Or if other people have the same type of problem and you keep running into it, maybe you can join a forum, a support group, whatever.

If it's something where maybe at work, you're getting some tough feedback, then you can look at this as an opportunity to A, feel compassion for whoever has to give the tough feedback. You can acknowledge that it's hard for them.

Maybe you can even schedule more time with that person to, for example, if it's a boss, you can schedule a time with them to do touchbacks on your progress at work and do your best to improve because we all want to be the best that we can be.

If it's something where maybe you're getting in an argument with your partner or something, you can take this as an opportunity to get even closer with them and look at it as a way to find potential solutions together, be vulnerable about what's behind whatever is happening. If you want to use this as an opportunity to be closer to people, you definitely can.

Take some time to just be grateful that you're human, that you have a body, you're alive, and that you get to experience a range of emotions.

When something negative happens, you can just say, "Yeah, some things do suck about being human but there's also some really amazing things. There's great people in my life. There's the taste of delicious food, smell of fresh flowers, how great it feels when you get a massage, when you take a bath," whatever brings you pleasure.

You can take whatever is happening that's negative and just use this to remind yourself that you're so lucky to be alive.

For example, let's say, even if something tragic happens, someone dies or something, you can ask yourself, "What's the best possible thing that can happen from this?“

Maybe you now get to be closer with your family or you get to let someone help you and it draws you guys closer. Maybe you just realized that someone stopped suffering now. Or maybe you can even do something in the person who died's honor because you want to have their spirit live on.

We've all seen different charity campaigns from people who created them because someone close to them passed away and ended up creating all this good will in the world.

If you ask yourself what the best case can be from whatever is happening, it can really help you make a positive from it. If it's something like you get in an argument with someone, then this can be a great way to establish new communication. A lot of times, arguments are just mismatched expectations.

You can use it to either establish better expectations or maybe to communicate clearer boundaries. There's all kinds of things you can do. Whenever something negative happens, ask yourself, "What's the positive?"

If you're feeling upset because you've gained weight, ask yourself, "What's the benefit from this?" For me, for example, I think I've mentioned in another podcast how I got this thing called PCOS, and it made me gain a bunch of weight.

Basically now, just practically everything makes me gain weight. I'd been gaining more and more weight every year and it drove me crazy at first.

But now, I look at it as...and I'm not perfect about it. But I look at it like, "OK, this is great because I'm forced now to eat super, super healthy because if I eat anything that's not healthy, I'm going to gain weight really easily." This is a great opportunity to get margarines into my diet. When I have margarines, I feel more energized anyway, so that's great.

Those are some different things that you can do.

For example, you know how you're talking to two different people and you're trying to figure out who's telling the truth and who's lying, the person who's lying is usually going to over exaggerate why they're telling the truth.

They'll just go on and on and on about how truthful they are, whereas the person who's telling the truth, they'll just be clear. They'll just say their truth and that's it. They don't really need to go in the library because they're secure in their truth.

The same thing happens if something happens where maybe someone says something about you or something and you really get mad about it, usually, that's an awesome opportunity for you to realize that there's probably a kernel of truth to it because if it didn't resonate with you and you didn't believe it, you wouldn't care.

If you hear something that bothers you, think about how you can work through that. For me, I know my general rule of thumb is that, anytime something negative comes for me, maybe someone said something or even just experience a negative emotion, I ask myself, "What's going on behind this? Why is this bothering me?“

It becomes then a beautiful vehicle for clearing out whatever is upsetting me. Get back to the origin of why this started to bother me and how I can just change my story around it.

It's not going to work in all situations but, for example, if someone died, maybe it's hard to learn unless, unless actually even that case, if someone died because they got something that was preventable such as lung cancer from smoking, you can take that as a learning lesson, too. But in many cases, it does work as well.

Even if it's not true, it's not a bad mindset to have, to just go through the world assuming that everything is happening for your highest good. I can think of far less empowering mindsets.

Find a blessing in whatever is happening. Even if you break up with somebody or something, realize that a lot of times, people will say that they broke up with people as the best thing that ever happened to them, or people got fired, it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to them.

Just know that whatever is happening is happening for your highest good, and just be glad for it. The last thing you can do is just take ownership of whatever's bothering you.

What I mean is if something keeps coming up in your life and it keeps bothering you, then make it your business to figure out the solution to it so that it either stops happening to you, because sometimes we seem to get life lessons over and over and over until we learn how to just get through them. Or if it happens again anyway after you've come up with a solution, then you're going to be able to move through it a lot faster.

I hope this helps you. As I said, you might not resonate with every single one that I've mentioned but, even if one or two popped up at you as I was going through them, that would be phenomenal.

Again, if something happens in your life that's not so great and, of course, it's going to happen, then just think back to your arsenal hero of tools that you can use and apply them and see if it helps you. Just experiment.

I'd love to hear how it goes. If you have any thoughts or comments or anything, feel free to go on rachelrofe.com. Any questions, you can also feel free to join our Facebook group rachelrofe.com/facebookgroup.

If you have anything going on there and you want to talk about it or look for reframes or brag about the way that you've been able to reframe, you're totally welcome to come in there.