taking my hand off the hot stove

Yesterday, I accidentally smashed a bottle of red wine in our kitchen. Pieces of the broken bottle scattered everywhere, and red wine covered the floor and splashed on the walls—it was a huge mess.

Understandably, I was very pissed off at first.

But I remembered Shirzad Chamine's mantra of "taking the hand off the hot stove." He writes about this in his fantastic book, "Positive Intelligence".

Just as we immediately pull our hand away when we accidentally burn it on a hot stove, we should do the same with negative emotions.

Are negative emotions useful? Yes, but only as an alert. Once you've received that alert, take your hand off the hot stove and act on it constructively.

And that's what I did. I put on a nice podcast, saw the cleaning as a little workout, and got going. It wasn't that bad, and afterward, I even was in a better mood than before.