Perspective is everything. Frustration feels uncomfortable so we tend to put a negative connotation on it. What if we were to remove that label and really looked at what frustration leads to? Frustration leads to change. When we are frustrated it is so uncomfortable we become willing to change in order to remove the frustration. Frustration actually leads to something positive.
Why do we feel frustration? Almost always we feel frustration at its most acute when we know clearly what we want but our actions aren't giving us the desired results. Frustration is painful.
I remember a science experiment from Jr. High. The teacher ran cold water 
through a rubber hose and asked each one of us to hold it. He asked us what our hand felt. We all told him, it felt cold. Then he did the same thing with another hose, but this time the water was hot. We all felt the hose, we all felt hot. Then he wrapped the two hoses together (like twisting a pipe cleaner). The teacher asked us what we expected to feel if we touched the combined hoses. Most of us said we expected to feel both hot and cold, and a couple of people expected that the two would cancel each other out and we would feel lukewarm. Imagine our surprise when we touched the hose, what we felt was pain! It turns out that our nervous system is not capable of feeling two things at one time, and when it is asked to in its confusion it offers up pain.
Isn't that what frustration is? We have a good feeling about something that we want, or something that we want to accomplish. But we have a negative feeling because we have not yet achieved our goal. So we feel the pain of frustration.
When I feel frustration, I remind myself that what I am feeling is the mix of the positive and the negative. Then I ask myself what do I need to change? Then good things start to happen. When we are clear about the causes of frustration we can use it to our advantage to create necessary change.
