Emotion: Frustration

Meaning: 1) We feel like we’re doing everything we’re supposed to be doing, AND
2) We’re not getting the result we think we ought to get.

Frustration is an exciting feeling when you know what it means. It means that you’re almost certainly close to the result you wanted. Frustration means that we think we ought to have produced the desired result from our actions. Frustration means that we think we did everything we think we ought to have done, and something didn’t work out. That’s how close you are to your desired outcome, so close that you think you ought to have gotten it.

Check the Process

If you believe you have all the pieces, chances are that you have most of the pieces. The first thing you do is check to see what you think you’re supposed to do to produce the result. Try to find out if that’s really what it should take to produce the desired result. Sometimes something has been overlooked in the process.

More often, we missed some important variable, such as making sure someone else really understood their part and would remember. This is part of why many parents are frustrated with their children - it means that while the parents think they did what they needed to do, with the approach they used, they could not cause their child to really understand or really remember. Sometimes it will just take seemingly endless repetition.

Check Your Steps

Then check to make certain you actually did all the steps you think you did. You may have missed a piece, especially if you were momentarily distracted. As a side note, if you were distracted, don’t blame the distraction angrily for breaking your rule about nothing distracting you. Learning to focus through distraction is an important life skill.

If you believe you know what it should take to produce the result, and you believe you did all those steps, but you still aren’t producing the result you ought to get, then that tells you that the desired result obviously does not always flow from the actions you took. That means that you may be missing a piece. Try to find out what else you need to put in, what you need to take out, or what you need to do differently.

Don’t Repeat Failed Strategies

If something clearly isn’t producing the desired result, don’t keep doing it over an over again. One father was constantly frustrated at his failure to get his children to chew with their mouths closed. His particular strategy consistently resulted in the problem getting worse, but he kept using it anyway. He continued with the failed strategy for more than ten years, oblivious that he was expecting his strategy to someday produce a result exactly opposite of what it had been doing for a decade.

If something isn’t working, you ought to change it. Sometimes a strategy just needs repetition. Children and a disturbing number of teens and adults forget rules and morals when they want something. Sometimes the rules simply need to be repeated and taught over and over, with penalties for disobedience, until the person learns. Sometimes the problem is the strategy itself. When something isn’t working consistently, but, rather, is consistently producing an undesireable result, then we need to look at it more closely.

It may be that the outcome has some variable over which your actions have little control, such as a mechanical issue with a car or an electronic issue with a computer and printer. If you find this to be the case, then you need to consider that when you aren’t getting your result.

Our Normal Response is Backwards

Frustration means that you feel like you’re close to getting the result you want. Feeling stupid because you got close to your answer doesn’t help. What it does is prompt you to quit at the very time you need to find one or two more steps. A sense of hopelessness might prompt quitting since that feeling tells you that you are so far from your answer that you don’t think you can possibly accomplish your outcome. Frustration is the opposite. It is the sense of being close, very close, but not quite there. It’s the exciting feeling that tells you to hunt hard for the final pieces that will finish producing the result you want.

FREQUENT FRUSTRATION

When Frustration shows up repeatedly in a particular endeavor, that should be warning to us. That means that we keep thinking that we’re doing everything to produce the intended result, but we consistently don’t produce the result with our actions. It means that we’re consistently wrong, and probably thinking too highly of ourselves.

This is often the case when someone doesn’t practice, doesn’t study, doesn’t pay close attention, doesn’t follow instructions, but for some reason still expects to be able to produce the result. This person would be Frustrated because he thinks that the wrong or incomplete thing they are doing ought to be enough. It isn’t, and he feels Frustrated when he reaps the natural consequences of his mistaken actions, or lack thereof.

Highly intelligent or talented people may be particularly susceptible to this. Because they know they have tremendous ability, they think that they should not also need effort. Rather than take advantage of their aptitude to become the best they can be, they too often seek to do just enough, and very frequently discover that “just enough” isn’t enough at all. They discover through their Frustration that they need to do something differently, but in the arrogance of natural ability, they sometimes will not consider effort and personal growth to be the answer.

When we encounter frequent Frustration, we have to look to ourselves first. If there are others who are succeeding, then we know the thing is possible. If there are others with abilities that resemble our own, or aptitudes that may even be inferior, who manage to outperform us, then we know that the problem lies within us. As easy as it may be to blame others, and thus disavow any power we have to fix things, we have to consider that we are the problem.

Then we have to fix it. We have to adjust our thinking about what something will take for us to produce the intended result. We cannot think that it should be easy for us when the evidence of personal experience clearly shows that it is not. We cannot keep doing the same thing and expecting the results to change.

We know that if something isn’t working that we need to change it. If we keep thinking we’ve got it, and we keep discovering that we don’t, then we need to change. What it means is that we have consistently misjudged what we needed to do, how much effort we needed to expend, to produce the result we desired. If we discover that to be true, failure to change is self sabotage.

CONFUSION AND FRUSTRATION AS A PRELUDE TO LEARNING

I read in the newspaper that a major study was done trying to study what they called the “Eureka Moment.” They are tracking down the neuro-impulses in the brain that reveal information about that moment in which the brain goes “aha!” An interesting effect of the study was that they found that people remembered better if they had to struggle with something for a moment before they actually understood what they were doing. This pattern is played out in my own experience, and the models we use to discuss the design of the human mind support it.

When we start off confused, our brain is telling us that it believes that the information makes sense, but it isn’t making sense to us. When the emotion is particularly intense, it means that we’re certain that there’s a meaningful pattern here, and we sure that we should figure it out, but we just can’t quite put it together. What we need is a key to unlock the mystery, a missing piece of information that will complete the picture for us or show us how to put it together.

If the starting emotion was frustration, it means our brain is telling us that we ought to have produced the intended result with what we did, but the result did not occur. It might be that we studied and our test score was still low. It might be that we did all the steps in the instruction book, but the new software still isn’t working. When the emotion is intense, it means that we feel certain that we did everything we were supposed to do, but the result still didn’t occur and we remain certain that we should have succeeded.

What makes both of these emotions so powerful is that they are both emotions that reveal the the brain thinks it’s close. When the Emotions attach these feelings to an event, it means that it needs more focus. It may need expanded thinking. It may need more attention to detail. It means that we’re almost there and we just need to take one or two more steps to arrive at our desired result. We need to do it just a little bit differently.

The proper response to confusion is to look for a key, to try to put the pieces together differently, to guess through all reasonable possibilities and try them to see if they could be the one. Even a young child knows that when he doesn’t know the answer to 2+2 that he should keep guessing small numbers. He’s not likely to guess “J” because he knows the answer has to be a number. He’s not likely to guess “15,000,000” because he knows the number has to be somewhere close to 2, maybe 22, but not likely a really high number.

The proper response to frustration is to tinker with what you did. Frustration means that you think that what you did ought to have produced the result, but if the procedure works and it just didn’t work this time, you might have missed something. If there was something wrong in the procedure, then it needs to change, maybe just a little, maybe a lot. Something needs to be done differently.

At my business, one of my lights went out and needed work. It was a good opportunity to learn something new, so I read up on how to fix them and set about to do so. However, the number of wires on my replacement ballast did not match the number of wires on my light. The ballast is the electrical fixture inside the flourescent lights in most businesses. Of course, I was confused at first. I knew that the system made sense to whomever built it, and that the light used to work and that I had what was almost certainly the right part. However, the directions and what I held in my hands didn’t quite match up.

It turned out that the light wiring combined two of the wires in the ballast, so I had to wire it a little differently than the instructions to get it work right. It was just a matter of modifying the procedure to match items from two different manufacturers, carefully reading the labels of each so I did not create a problem. In short, all I had to do was carefully read the labels and compare them to one another and my directions. I discovered how each was put together and was able to safely figure out how to resolve the challenge.

When we’re dealing with Emotions, the intensity of the feeling tells our Mind how important something is. When a child starts off confused or frustrated, the Emotion has attached some importance to it. If a child simply waits for the answer to be given, there is no importance attached. The conditioning becomes “If I can’t do it easily on my first try, just wait and someone else will do it for me.” Learning is substantially diminished.

This is part of what makes the asking technique so powerful when teaching children. The natural fear of being wrong can be a strong fear in adults, much less children. It’s easier to simple remain silent, maybe shrugging one’s shoulders or answering with “I’m not sure,” or “I don’t know.” That way the brain doesn’t have to work. That way we don’t have to try, and therefore we do not risk failure. People who in part measure their self-worth by not being wrong often use this strategy. It’s the opposite of the person who is only concerned about how many times they are right - you are right more often by guessing wildly than by not trying at all.

However, when we don’t try, we kill the possibility of success. Not only that, but when someone does come to our aid to simply provide the answer with no effort on our part, we don’t remember it nearly as well - if at all. We learn to be weak, and we learn that being weak and simpleminded is the path to avoid failure. To avoid being wrong, we unintentionally avoid being right. To avoid looking like we don’t know something, we end up not knowing anything nearly as well as we could.

Part of learning for ourselves means being willing to face confusion and frustration on the path to learning. It means recognizing that those emotions are part of the process at its most effective. It means that when we are teaching our children, we learn to let them struggle, and we learn to give them hints and clues and keys, but we don’t simply give them the answer. This way, they can reap the benefits of the process done right. It means that when we do have to give them the answer, we make them answer the question again later with the right answer so they learn it.

The more we understand how the Emotions and Mind work, we can employ our Will to produce the best result. In the case of learning, those moments of struggle lead to the highest level of success.