Have You Learned Your Lessons Yet?
When faced with a challenge or a conundrum, most people will look to change the circumstances in order to change the result. I don’t believe that works. I believe the cycle will repeat until you’ve truly understood the situation and its origins. You will truly get a idea that you haven’t if the situation repeats itself in your life. This is a massive clue. I’m not perfect and things are repeating in my life and it’s because of that, the result that has led me to sit here and write this right now.
A common repeated scenario I hear from women is ‘I keep falling for the same type of guy’. A common one for the guys is ‘I keep moving too fast with a woman and realising I don’t love her’. Or from both sexes: I want to change career because I’m not happy where I am. The simple problem here is that not many people ask why?. They never get to the bottom of the reasons for the repeated results. However, there is a caveat to all this and it actually takes precedence over finding the why, and it’s extracting the gift and declaring the thank you.
Finding The Gift
The thing I want to make clear here is that this is not just looking for the positive in all situations. There is positive and negative in everything. Often our perception is lop-sided. The key here is getting to a point where you truly understand the gift or opportunity the situation has given you. I want you to truly look deeper and find the in what way has that event served you? Maybe you were being oppressed by a person with a stronger will than you. Lets look at that more closely.
Yes they were bitchy to you, yes they were mean to you. What gift did they give you? Was their actions in some way making your will stronger? Did the situation teach you to fight your corner? Did their constant bullying make you more resilient?
Lets take another example. Have you been moving from one job to another only to find you haven’t been enjoying them at all? That wherever you go you feel the same way? What gift can you extract from that situation? Maybe it’s a simple as having your eyes opened to that fact that your life is not meant to be about working behind a desk doing a 9 – 5 for the rest of your life? Maybe it’s to show you exactly what you don’t want to do.
Another example: You might have a persisting pain in your body. Maybe the gift is letting go of your stubbornness and finally going to see a doctor to get it fixed. Maybe it’s to give you a higher pain threshold. Maybe it’s to learn to meditate to heal yourself.
Get the picture?
There is no right or wrong answer in what you will take away or extract from the each situation. It’s just up to you to open your eyes and look. Keep looking, keep digging, don’t just stop at finding one or two things from each situation, find 20 gifts. Push yourself until you feel genuinely grateful for that event manifesting in the first place.
Your challenges will follow you until you extract the gift and declare you thank you.
To Summarise:
1. Know that you challenges will follow you and may just change form.
2. Go through the process of extracting the gifts and declaring the mistakes
3. You have a choice – repeat this process? Or, repeat those events. It’s your call.
Hey Amit!
I’m amazed to see at myself (believing I’m a fast learner) and virtually everyone else around me how slow learners we actually are. We will persist in doing the exact same things, which do not work, and then wonder why we don’t get the results we want.
I think learning from our mistakes takes a lot of awareness and willingness to get out of inertia. Both of which are skills which take some time to master.
Cheers,
Hey Ed, you said it best when you mentioned your awareness. Maybe one of us needs to write a whole post about that subject. The art of developing the awareness of a guru or something along those lines! 🙂
Hey hey,
Loving it! It’s so true, if you haven’t learnt the lesson the first time round, it WILL come back, disguised in a different shape and form.
I recently have come to an abrupt head with someone who I regarded as someone very close to me but I put up with their bitchy attitude and comments and constant negative and draining energy for my entire life – Crazy!!!! I used to let it affect me so badly to the point of being in tears, I remember calling a friend once talking about something that had happened with this person and their reaction (or lack of) and hearing it out loud made me realise how pathetic the whole thing was.
In the last year the relationship has completely changed, because I’ve changed – by learning to look at what I have gained from it, I’ve strengthened and grown and therefore remain happy and light and carefree, whereas the other is frustrated because their attempts are fruitless….by my not reacting, instead focusing and transforming the energy I remain happy and maintain my self respect. Yay
xx
That’s great to hear Swati. The good news you’re not the only one who’s behaved irrationally and then looked back and though…why the heck did I do that. Lord knows I’ve done it and still do it. Lessons will always arrive in a variety of forms.
Hi Amit,
We have all experienced that cycle to some degree in our lives. The reason we get in those cycles is because we have ‘deep-content’ thoughts, submerged in the subconscious level of our mind, insisting that we deserve to suffer. We first must become aware of this, and simply say ‘be gone with thee’ every time these thoughts come up. This simple shift in internal self-talk has made a huge difference for me. And like you said, once we find the gift in the lesson we can make room for real change.
Hey Rob, you’ve echoed what Ed mentioned earlier about the awareness. Recognition is the key to making those subtle changes and then I think it becomes a habit after that to. It’s like anything else I guess that once that habit is formed it does get a little bit easier.
Amit –
Good article. Getting deeper and getting to the root of a problem often leads us to something quite different from the original symptom. In my work, I keep digging with someone until we get to what is really going on – sometimes it takes a long time to recognize the reality of a challenge. Once identified we can be honest with ourself and learn new sustainable skills to change and grow. Thanks for a great post.
Phil
.-= New at Phil – Less Ordinary Living’s blog ..15 Secrets to Thriving in the 21st Century Workplace –Part 1 =-.
Hey Phil, glad you enjoyed and thanks for commenting. It seems this recognition is a huge recurring theme right now. I think I’m being given a hint for one of my next topics. 😉
I love it! There are always learning opportunities, right? Whenever I get down about something ‘going wrong’ I like to look back at things in the past that I thought went wrong, and trace a line over to the good things that came out of them. It sounds silly, but it works!
.-= New at Marianne Cantwell’s blog ..How to Get Your Dream Date AND your Dream Career =-.
That sounds like a ridiculously simple and yet effective process Marianne. I may even give that a go for myself and even use that on some of my clients! Awesome!
Hey Amit,
Dude,
I posted a short clip of Oprah saying a profound statement in regards to this post of learning lessons. Oprah states, “Whenever we are met with a failure, we must ask ourselves, What is this here to teach me?” So the idea is when we learn that lesson we can move on to the next lessons. But if we stay stuck and repeat like you say, this “cycle” the lesson conintues to show up in different forms but with the same basic principles.
Hey Baker, I would love to see that clip, where can I find it? Oprah must have been reading my blog! 😛
This is a terrific question and I appreciate how you ask us to dig deep. I’m going to go do that right now. Thanks so much!
.-= New at Sandra Lee’s blog ..Are all these thoughts necessary? =-.
Hey Sandra, thanks for commenting and let me know how it goes! 🙂
Hello Amit,
How are you doing? Good post. People sometimes don’t learn lessons from the past and keep on repeating history numerous times in Life.
When something is not working out and person keeps quitting the job.. there is something else which he is good at and it is somewhere hidden in the brain and cannot get through to it. So, ‘ANALYZE each and every failure’ and evaluate.
Getting stuck will do no good…evaluate, correct yourself, and move on.
Cheers!
Cheryl Paris
The Acorn Coach Blog
.-= New at Cheryl Paris’s blog ..Action Strategies to Reduce Anxiety =-.
Thanks Cheryl and you have said something very important and profound.
Thanks so much for this post! Very useful and made me think a bit about my life.
.-= New at Roman Soluk’s blog ..The main benefits of walking outdoors =-.
Hey Roman, thanks for commenting and I’m glad it was valuable info for you.
Hi Amit,
Well isn’t that the Truth. And until the paing of staying the same is greater than the fear of change we’ll all just keep doing something repeatedly that doesn’t work. Like hitting our heads against the wall. We find one day It Hurts!
Hello Amit, looking within and digging deep often helps with so many of our challenges. And I really like that you emphasize finding the gift. That alone can sometimes be enough to release the hold that bad patterns have on us. To acknowledge that there is a lesson and to be thankful for it, there’s immense wisdom there.
Hey Belinda, definitely worth taking the time to find that gift. 🙂 Thanks you for sharing! 🙂
Bang on Amit! We keep getting lessons (or messages from life) until we realise what we’re doing that’s not helping ourselves. Some of them hurt like break-ups and physical pain but the lessons remain until we understand and most of all, listen to ourselves and our intuition. I agree what Oprah said on such issues, “We know, we always know inside what’s wrong”. Can’t beat that!
.-= New at John Sherry’s blog ..3 Special Words that Change Your Life =-.
Hey John, Thanks for commenting and interesting example of the breakups. In a recent conversation I had with someone this exact point came up but they struggled to see what they could get from it but eventually, they came around and understood that the break up was, in fact, a good thing.
sometimes it can be hard for us to realise that there is a lesson in everything. Life is about learning. Nice post 🙂
.-= New at B @ logos coaching’s blog ..A few quotes too long for Twitter =-.
there is definately alot to learn about lessons, ive been doing alot of learning recently having faced challenges myself last year, but one thing i have gained is resiliance and to stand my ground when I need to and to face the things I am scared of, yikes! which isnt easy but the motivation is the satisfaction i get from facing that challenge. 🙂 I think life is my best teacher.
A situation has repeated itself along with the events..idk wat to do???
Hi Rinki, what exactly is it you would like help with?
~Amit 🙂