Spotting the monster at daylight

Today I will present you an example of how the depression monster can come to life. I learned that it is important to be able to smell the monster as soon as he gets in your way, and "shoot him dead" immediately.

I have been working with the team on an urgent and quite important problem in one of the projects, and I led the team to put together a few options on how the problem could be handled. I gave my comments and got them addressed, and then I was checking with my boss - one of us needed to present it to senior management for consideration. She asked me to do it, but also remarked that site management would like to see certain detail (which I had not thought about).

An average person would probably just arrange for another correction, and not be bothered. But my monsters immediately jumped on me, with their ugly smile straight into my face: "See? You ARE stupid! You should have noticed that, and not let your boss point it out to you. What do you look like in her eyes now? You are not reliable, not responsible, you cannot take care of important things. One must lead you by the hand with everything!....."  and so on, and so on.

The above is my very typical way of thinking when I am heavily depressed. Luckily I am not now, so I need to counter it. Something I learned recently (and it comes from explanatory style theory, which I learned about and not invented myself) is that I can apply certain shields by thinking of this as a specific and temporary issue, and avoid generalisation:

• I specifically did not think about it here, in this particular situation. It does not mean that I am generally stupid (and I can do many other things - in fact most of them - well).
• It happened at this particular time, and it does not mean that it happens always (and in fact it does not - I am usually good at breaking things to pieces)
• Not take it personally. There were many people working on this, and no one except for one person pointed to this. That may be because she knows from her experience that it is what the senior management would be asking about.

Having reframed it as above, I can think of it as a learning experience. The monster is gone (to sleep - he will wake up again some time).

Hope this can help you fight your monsters. It works when there is just one or not more than a few of them. Once you allow an army of monsters to surround you, it gets more difficult.