Rules to Live By; Or, How I'm Trying to Lower My Blood Pressure

So I was talking to one of my friends at work today. She works from home too, so sometimes we chat on the phone, which I think is my equivalent to catching up in the coffee room or chatting over the water cooler, which you lucky folks who actually work in offices get to do. Most days my only contact with another living being is when my cat comes to check on me (barrage of nasty emails all day long notwithstanding).

My friend is one of those people who just lets everything bother her and make her feel even worse about herself than she does anyway. It's sad, and I often try to give her pep talks; I'm usually wildly unsuccessful in my effort, but I think today I might have helped myself more than my friend, even if it was inadvertant.

After she went on a (rather lengthy) tirade about how the person who was meant to back her up while she took a vacation actually had the audacity to take a vacation day herself, thus foiling my friend's back up plan, I told her about two rules I was trying to make myself repeat about 437 times a day:

1) Not everyone thinks the way I do. And thusly, not everyone makes the same decisions I would make, nor do they react to things as I do or expect them to.

2) I should try to be less judgemental of people who do not think the way I do.

To most normal people in the world, these are probably the most obvious, "how could you have lived 36 years without already realizing this?", types of thought. But they are not obvious to me, and they seemed even less obvious to my friend.

I told her I was trying to become less judgemental and critical because I felt like being both was largely what makes my job so infinitely frustrating, annoying, and puke-inducing (and these would be the good days). And this week is an especially trying week to attempt this little experiment since I've had one long-time employee choose this week as her semi-annual functional-adult-who-morphs-into-petulant-and-passive aggressive-7-year-old for her latest meltdown. Yeah, lucky me.

And understand here I am normally Ms. Judgy McJudgerson; I have an opinion, a comment, or a criticism for almost everything I encounter. So this is not an easy task. I need moral support here, readers.

What other axiom should I add to my daily chant?