Bad days happen to the best of us. Days where you just wake up in a really bad mood. Where something (or nothing) has made you angry, sad, frustrated, disappointed, whatever. Days where you know up front that “MAN, this is going to suck”.

You still have to get up and go to work, but before you even get there, you’re already seething inside. You try to do your job but somehow all the angry, dissatisfied clients have conspired to call you and complain on the same day – though you have no idea how they coordinated that little feat.

Everything your co-workers say to you sounds incredibly stupid. Everyone seems out to annoy you. The next person to open his mouth is likely to get his head ripped clean off.

Not much fun, huh? Luckily, you can do something about it. Here are six ways to turn around a bad day.

1: Accept your bad mood

Being in a bad mood is not that hard. Being in a bad mood while trying to force yourself to cheer up really sucks.

Fighting a bad mood only prolongs it, so if you’re mad, be mad. If you’re sad, be sad. This does not give you license to be rude and unpleasant to innocent bystanders, it just means that you need to recognize and accept your bad mood to be able to do something about.

2: Tell others

In one chapter of the Happy At Work Book, I describe how the IT support department at medical company Leo Pharma give employees permission to say when they’re having a bad day. With the result that people have fewer bad days and recover faster from the ones they do have.

You can try to keep you bad mood a secret and put on your happy mask. Guess what, you’re fooling nobody. Your co-workers will notice and they will wonder what they’ve done to piss you off.

The best thing to do, is to tell the peope you work closely with. Simply tell them “listen guys, I’m in a really sour mood to today. I’m not sure why, but it’s nothing you have done. If I bite your head off, I apologize in advance”.

3: Look inside first

In the extremely influential book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman argues that EQ, your emotional quotient, is what makes you successful, not IQ. This means that the truly successful people are not the smart ones but the ones with the best emotional skills.

Goleman defines five emotional competencies that make up EQ, two of which are:

1. The ability to identify and name one’s emotional states and to understand the link between emotions, thought and action.
2. The capacity to manage one’s emotional states — to control emotions or to shift undesirable emotional states to more adequate ones.

In other words, EQ relies on your ability to recognize and deal with your own emotions.

When you’re in a bad mood, it’s extremly tempting to look around you for sources of that mood. “Man I’m annoyed today. Must be Paul talking loudly on the phone. Or Lisa being late with the specs once again. Or…”

We tend to think that a bad mood is always caused by something or someone else. And when we’re in a bad mood, everything suddenly becomes annoying, making it even easier to find justifications for the bad mood.

But not every bad mood has a reason. Maybe you just slept badly. Or you’re coming down with the flu. Or you’re just having a bad day. In these cases, trying to justify a bad mood is a sucker’s bet.

Instead, you must look inside yourself first, to see what might or might not be the cause of your negative emotional state. Here’s one way to do it…………………………

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