Lost Opportunities

Your Daily Mental Battles

One of the worst feelings in life is when you have been presented with an opportunity and you failed to capitalize on it. The pain that follows is like an emotional bee sting, except one-hundred times more painful. It tends to linger for hours on end, sometimes even into the next day. Nobody enjoys lost opportunities, but is there anything that we can do to avoid the pain that is associated with them?

It depends on what you consider a lost opportunity. For every person, an opportunity may be interpreted differently. But it really does not matter if somebody else does not understand your lost opportunity, because to you it feels very real. Your job is not to convince someone else about your lost opportunity; it’s to find a way to either avoid the pain or to deal with it in a healthier way.

When we miss out on an opportunity, we often feel guilty, weak, worthless, annoyed, hopeless, desperate, angry and sad. Sometimes the emotions may become unbearable, killing all of our motivation and ruining our day as a result; this is the worst case scenario. When you allow this to happen, you are only worsening your mental health by unnecessarily stressing yourself out.

The reality is that there is no way to prevent lost opportunities. You can always tell yourself, “I’ll do this next time and it won’t happen again! I’ll actually act on it!” This kind of positive thinking may be helpful, but realistically speaking, it won’t be applicable on every occasion. There is no way to control how you will think and feel when your next opportunity will present itself.

Remaining optimistic is definitely the way to go, but just know that on any given day you may not be on top of your game, and that is when an opportunity might present itself. What will happen is that you will once again miss it, resulting in your unhappiness. Therefore, prevention of missed opportunities is not the solution.

The solution is to simply not care that much when you do miss out on an opportunity. Yes, the experiences will hurt and you will feel some kind of negative emotions within yourself. But the key is to handle them in a mentally healthy way, and allow them to pass swiftly without any lingering.

Don’t bury your emotions because they will not go away in the long run; they will resurface again in the near future. Burying your emotions is only delaying your processing of them. You have to find a way to train your mind to not be as negatively affected by missed opportunities. Rewire your mind along the lines of, “Oh well, it wasn’t meant to be even though I really wanted it to be. Next time I guess. I’m going to enjoy the rest of my day now!”

Don’t waste unnecessary energy beating yourself up because you didn’t capitalize on an opportunity. Just remember that things always happen the way their meant to happen, even if you feel otherwise! Move on and remain optimistic that you will capitalize on the next one!

And don’t think so much about it. Just go with the flow.

Are you Ready? (This is Defeating Stigma Mindfully)