DB Bedford waited for a mailed check that never arrived despite a photo from the post office. His frustration teaches an emotional intelligence lesson: you can't control whether the check shows up, only how you react to it. Accepting reality and laughing about it beat the anxiety loop.
Peace fam, DB Bedford here, the EI guy. If it's your first time checking me out, that means the emotionally intelligent guy. And so I, uh, EI moment. You guys know I like to share, be transparent. Uh, a little frustrated, uh, because, you know, I don't know about you, but, you know, uh, I get an email when the post office is delivering mail for the day. I'll get an email that say, hey, they'll take a picture of the images and say you got this mail coming, right? And so normally, and by the end of the day when I go to my mailbox, it's there. So this particular time it's a check that I'm waiting on, and, uh, I see the picture of the check. I'm normally not tripping, uh, it's supposed to come on Saturday. Go to mailbox on Saturday, it's not there. I'm like, hmm. So, uh, Sunday obviously no mails come, but then I just kind of double-check. Then I'm like, well, I wonder what happened to it, right? So then Monday comes, yesterday, nothing. So, you know, I go to the post office just now. This is Tuesday, and I'm asking them about the process, and they like every— you know, I talked to about 2 different people. They like, oh, don't worry about it, it's probably lagging behind, things of that nature. And I'm like, man, but for the whole time, like every time it says the mail is there, it's there. So it's hard for me to wrap my head around that this time is different. This is the EI moment, right? The story that I'm telling myself. So, uh, they are telling me to just wait. So now my mind is going, okay, that was Saturday, number one, and this is Tuesday. So that's one day, two day, three day, right? Then I'm telling myself, well, that never happened before. So then you wondering, well, what happened? And because it's a check, you know how we are, we start thinking about like, man, what, somebody got my check, things of that nature. The, you know, the mind start playing tricks on you. So while I'm talking to the people, I found myself getting a little agitated because they were like, just wait. I said, okay, well, just hypothetically speaking, if it didn't show up, then what would I do? It's like, you're gonna have to call them and ask them to cut you another check. And so then logically I'm going, but if the post office took a picture of the check to tell me it was coming, that means that the post office Has possession of it, and the post office doesn't take any responsibility for that? And they both looked at me and just was like, I mean, I don't know what to tell you. Like, we, you know, it might come later. It could— they gave me all these reasons why it might not have came, but basically it was like ain't nothing they could do. And it was in that moment where I had to laugh and I had to just say to myself, so at the end of the day, y'all telling me there's nothing I could do? I just gotta let it be what it's gonna be? And we all laughed about it. What's the moral of the story? You know, we talk about when it comes to emotional intelligence, right? We cannot control what happens. We only can control how we respond to what happens. So it doesn't matter how many people I talk to, how much I tell my story about this check. The check is not getting here until it gets here. And if it doesn't get here, I'm gonna have to ask them to cut another one. Either way, the There's nothing I could do. And when I had that laugh with them at the end of the conversation, it freed me from what I was building up about this check. I got reason to be emotional. It says it's here and it's not. Some days have went by. There's money involved. People feel like they're not— feel like people are not helping me or have the answers that I want. But the reality of it is, and I always talk about this in one of my trainings, that stress is usually activated when your expectations don't match reality. I'm expecting the check to be here. The reality of it is that it's not here. And so the faster that I accepted that it's not here, there's nothing I could do about it, I freed myself from any type of stress, worry, and emotions. That's what I'm talking about by practicing emotional intelligence in real time with real things. I'll catch you on the next one. Peace.
I was literally kicked off a Southwest flight before for being disrespectful.
