INDONESIAKININEWS.COM - This is a story about emotional intelligence, building resilience and (oddly) high school humor. I think we should...
I think we should start with the high school humor, and then work our way toward the emotional intelligence.
When I was a teenager, some friends and I used to frequent a Chinese restaurant. A girl who was sort of the center of the group and the life of the party-;let's call her Jessica-;introduced us to a "PG-13" joke that you probably know.
It went like this. At the end of every meal, we'd get fortune cookies, and we'd read the fortunes out loud. Then, we'd pause and look at Jessica.
With perfect timing, she'd add the same two words to the end of each fortune: "In bed."
- For example, my fortune might read: "Focus, determination, and hard work will always pay off..."
- And Jessica would add, "In bed!"
It made almost every fortune funny:
- "Challenge and adventure awaits!" ("In bed.")
- "Your road to success may be bumpy, but it will also be glorious." ("In bed.")
- "Everyone knows fear, but not everyone learns bravery. ("In bed.")
Here we are, decades later, and I cannot imagine of a fortune cookie without automatically adding the words, "in bed."
OK. Enough about memory lane. Let's fast-forward to the present, and how people with high emotional intelligence learn to use this trick, which we're calling the Fortune Cookie Rule, to become especially resilient.
The Fortune Cookie Rule is about training yourself to reclassify almost any criticism or rejection so that it encourages you rather than discourages you -- or at least falls into the realm of the irrelevant-;by learning to append simple, silent phrases to it in your mind.
I started realizing this technique after detecting a pattern in the way that a significant number of successful people described overcoming initial rejection.
It wasn't the most obvious phenomenon at first. The descriptions always seemed to come in the context of longer discussions, and nobody really mentioned emotional intelligence.
Also, these people seemed to apply the technique almost instinctively -- or at least without putting a name on what they were doing.
But whether they called it anything or not, it really was all about emotional intelligence.
Here's an example. Recently, we interviewed the mega-best-selling author, James Patterson, for my daily newsletter at Understandably.com.
One small part of our wide-ranging discussion focused on how Patterson reacted to the 31 rejections he got before his first novel was finally accepted.
In short, as Patterson described it, he learned not to hear, "rejection." Instead, he somehow always heard: "This one isn't right for me, but maybe your next one."
Another example: Brian Acton is a multi-billionaire and the former co-founder of WhatsApp. Back in 2009, he was a successful programmer who nevertheless kept getting turned down for high-profile jobs and documenting his rejections on Twitter.
Source: inc
