What do you do when things don’t go to plan. Well if you’re like most people, you’ll
probably try to look for an explanation.
This is a normal human thing that we do but it actually may not always
be that helpful.
This is a hardwired survival instinct.
When things go wrong we look for patterns, explanations as to why things
didn’t work out. We feel if we can
identify that pattern in the future we’ll be able to avoid those things from
happening again.
Whilst it is good to learn from your mistakes, if you want to learn
from your mistakes you must first establish whether or not what you’re doing
really is a mistake to begin with! It
has been said that a cat that sits on a hot stove once will never sit on a hot
stove again, but it will never sit on a cold stove again either. We must be sure that we’re learning the right
lessons.
Trust me when I say that I speak from experience. I used to be the worst offender of trying to
figure out a reason why things happen.
Whether it be a failure in business, the end of a valued friendship or
the loss of a job. I’m a very logical
person, and I used to ALWAYS fall into the trap of thinking that I could figure
out why things weren’t working and if I could figure out WHY then I would be
able to fix it.
What I’ve learned though is that sometimes things just happen, either
for no apparent reason or sometimes people will never actually tell you the
reason. But as humans, our hardwired
survival instinct subconsciously insists on finding one. The trap with this is that in our search for
the “reason” why things don’t work we may miss-identify a completely random
occurrence as being the “reason”. So
we’ll base our future actions on things that were never an issue to begin with.
What I’ve learned is that there is power in just being able to LET
GO! If you can identify a mistake, then
learn from it. But if you can’t find a
reason why things are, don’t try to invent one!
Just let go and move on.
In order to improve our situation in life, we must first improve our
observational skills. So many people are
held prisoner to the ideas that they have as to why things don’t work whilst
being oblivious to the very things that are going on around them. When
things don’t work out, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing anything
wrong. So if you’re looking to find what
you did wrong, when in reality you did nothing wrong, you’re going to be
looking for a very long time and ultimately never find what you’re looking
for. Or even worse, you’ll mistakenly
identify the wrong reason and spend your life trying to avoid something that was
never a problem in the first place.
What if instead, you did this.
If you can’t find a problem, just accept the fact that there may well
not even be a problem. So instead of
trying to find what went wrong, focus instead on all the things that went
RIGHT!
Think about the experiences that you’ve had in life where things
haven’t quite worked out. Ask yourself
the question, how did you react? Were
there obvious lessons that you could learn or did you fall into the trap of
“finding” things that weren’t there just so you could tell yourself that you
figured out what went wrong.
Now I want you to ask yourself this question. How might things have been different if you
had of just assumed (unless you have proof positive that there was a mistake
that you can learn from) that YOU had in fact done nothing wrong and instead of
giving up or avoiding this situation, what if you had of just powered on.
Now assuming that you’ve done nothing wrong, make a list of all the
things that you in fact did RIGHT! All
the ways in which YOU excelled, the ways that YOU were your highest self.
What was it about YOU that made things work as well as they did for as
long as they did?
What is it about YOU that people really appreciate?
What unique skills and abilities do YOU possess that enable YOU to be
able to succeed in a way that no one else could?
Write your answers in the comments below
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