Simone Stolzhoff

And then you go back and talk to them six months or a year later and they say, oh my gosh, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

It was this blessing in disguise.

It's a case of what psychologists tend to call effective forecasting, so our ability to predict how we will feel about future events.

And we are really bad at it.

There's been some canonical findings from Daniel Gilbert and others who show that we aren't very good forecasters about both what will happen in the future

and how those future events will make us feel.

And so I think that's a great case for reserving judgment about how those future events might go.

If you're able to heed some of the wisdom of the farmer and maintain a level of equanimity about how a given event might affect your life long term, you'll be able to maintain a little bit more of the peace of your mind and adapt more gracefully to whatever comes your way.

I profile a friend of mine named Emily Onhalt, and she is a therapist.

She works with leaders navigating uncertainty and change in their work.

But before she became a professional mental health therapist,

practitioner.

In her early 20s, her mom was diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness.

And so Emily spent weeks by her mom's bedside at the hospital and she was really struggling to cope.

She was riding this roller coaster of anticipatory grief and fear.

And one day, one of their family friends, this guy named Bill, who is an oncology doctor and has lots of experience dealing with people at the end of their lives, came to visit Emily.

And he said, Emily, how are you doing?

And Emily said, honestly, not very well.

I don't know how I'll be able to handle it if my mom were to pass away.

And Bill said, Emily, the version of you that will deal with that tragic event if or when it ever occurs will be born into existence in that moment.