May I start this piece with the saying that whether your experiences are positive or negative, what matters most is your ability to learn from them and turn those experiences into stepping stone on which you build to move to the next level of your career or life. However, it is pitiable that many people see each of their encounters as being accidental, undeserving or a question of mere luck and as such, they fail to learn anything tangible from them. This is not the best way to lead one’s life. Taking few minutes of your time to read this piece will serve as turning point for you.
One thing I want you to know is that no one can control time. Life teaches us that we won’t always get what we want right away, it teaches us that we still don’t have control over time no matter how good our time management skills are and no matter how good we are at predicting our future. If it’s not our time yet, we can do nothing about it (Naim, 2016). So, whatever your experiences have been, instead of being trapped in regrets, look away and learn positively from them. See such as a way of building yourself up for the next endeavor of your life. If you can perfectly follow this guideline, it means you’ve turned your experiences into training.
Also, your experiences can make you to become independent. We learn that we have to stand on our own and take care of ourselves. Our parents and teachers won’t guide us anymore, so it’s just us against the world and we have to be prepared for it, because no one is better equipped to answer our own questions but ourselves (Naim, 2016). If you fail to be independent-minded right from time, it would be difficult for you to succeed in life. Life is fully anchored on what you can do on your own and not what others can help you to achieve.
There are many lessons of life you can’t just learn on a platter of gold, even if the closest person to you shares the story with you; until you have a firsthand taste of it, you won’t know how it tastes like. One of these is how to overcome failure in life. In school when we failed a class, it was easy to make up for it or study harder for the next one, but in life, failure can scar us or even change our whole perspective on the meaning of life. Life teaches us that failure is a part of it, and that success can only come after so many failures. We learn how to move on from failure and accept it as part of our journey (Naim, 2016). So anytime you fail, you wouldn’t see it as the end, rather you see it as a means to an end. That is, you are step closer to your real and envisioned success. This is the circle on which life is built.
With the points given so far, you’d agree with me that everything is all about perception. I mean while others may perceive an experience to be negative, you can decide to perceive it as being positive, learn what you were supposed to learn from them and run your life with those experiences. The fact remains that our suffering is caused by how we perceive and interpret events and circumstances that occur in our lives. There are plenty of moments we can point to that probably haven’t been so positive, some that were quite unpleasant, and others that, at the time, felt unbearable (Thorp, 2018).
However, we always have a choice in how we interpret our experiences. We can choose to look back on past challenges through the narrow lens of defeat and resentment, or we can choose to open our hearts and take a deeper, more inquisitive approach by asking ourselves, “What is the gift or the lesson of this experience? How can I choose to perceive it differently so that I may benefit from the learning?” Take, for instance, the relationship that you so desperately wanted to work out when you were a teenager or young adult. At the time, you probably couldn’t imagine life without them. And yet, now you might look back on your first love and thank the universe that it didn’t work out because if it had, you wouldn’t be in your current relationship. Or, maybe you had a job that you loved that came with a boss who was abusive. You had to leave—or maybe you were even let go—and it felt awful. Later, you found a job that was even more incredible than the last and you probably thought “Oh, thank goodness I got out of that last place!” (Thorp, 2018).
There are endless examples of how—at the time—we see ourselves as a victim of our circumstances. And yet, once there’s some time and distance from that experience, you’re able to see how much you learned and how it has shaped and molded you into a better, wiser person. Cultivating your ability to look upon both past and present challenges as opportunities for learning can be liberating and help you better adapt to change. It’s through this practice that you can work with life’s ebbs and flows, rather than swimming upstream against them (Thorp, 2018). The ugly story of one Ms. Norma Jarman in Dublin when she visited one of her most cherished grocery stores but was disappointed by the treatment she received one of those days from a cashier. Instead of her to let that uncouth experience pull her down, she gathered herself, did the necessary things and at the end, was more respected than she could have ever imagined. Her ultimate lesson from her experience is that there is no perfect company anywhere but what is most important is how individuals and organizations respond to negative experiences (Jarman, 2018). If you allow an ugly event to tie you down, you wouldn’t get to know that there are countless pleasant experiences awaiting you.
References
Jarman, N (2018). How to Turn a Negative Situation into a Positive Experience. Retrieved from https://trainingmag.com/how-turn-negative-situation-positive-experience/
Naim, R (2016). 15 Powerful Lessons You Can Only Learn Through Experience. Retrieved from https://thoughtcatalog.com/rania-naim/2016/02/15-powerful-lessons-only-life-can-teach-us/
Thorp, T (2018). How to Transform Past Challenges into Learning Experiences. Retrieved from https://chopra.com/articles/how-to-transform-past-challenges-into-learning-experiences
Images are from: www.freepik.com
(C) 2021, Alan Elangovan, All Copy Rights Reserved.