Everything Happens for a Reason

 

I’ve thought long and hard about whether I should share this post with you, but on balance I’m hoping that it will help and maybe even inspire some of you who maybe going through tough times and need a bit of a boost.  So here goes …

2012 was without doubt one of the hardest 12 months of my life and despite my continued optimism, it remained incredibly difficult throughout.  I won’t go in to the details of what’s happened because it simply isn’t important.  What is important is what I’ve learned as a result, which is what I’d like to share. 

When you’re going through difficult times; it’s hard to see the reason for it.  Even for the most positive of people, there is the tendency to think, “Why me?” and that’s certainly where I was, especially towards the end of the year when things were looking particularly grim.  It seriously caused me to reconsider everything I thought I stood for and believed in.  

Now, looking back, I can see the positives in having gone through so much.  I’m a true believer that everything happens for a reason, that our actions today create our future (whether we realise it or not) and there are always things to learn from even the most difficult of circumstances.  After all, if we just tootled on day after day without anything ever changing, we would never grow and develop, we would never learn anything which I think is the whole point of why we’re here.

I’ve learned some incredibly hard and sometimes painful lessons over the past year, but hopefully, by sharing them, some of you may be able to identify and realise that you’re not on your own.  Here are just a few of the most important things I’ve learned (which I'll endeavour to cover in more detail in later posts):

1. What we think about comes about (including what we fear the most) - I thought I knew all there was to know about the law of attraction – after all, I’ve read enough and written enough about it - but I didn’t quite anticipate how it delivers your worst fears as well as your desires quite as well as it does … lesson learned.  It’s positive thoughts all the way now and banishing the worst case scenarios which we can often run almost unconsciously.
2. You always find a way through – No matter what happens to you in life, no matter how hard things get, you always find a way through it.  It might be tough when you’re in the middle of it, but there’s always a solution to everything, you just need to dig deep and look hard.
3. Worry is futile – I’ve talked about this in previous posts but actually living through adversity makes me believe this statement with absolute certainty.  Worry is such a useless emotion, which gets you worked up about things that may never happen and those things aren’t even reality.  Worry saps your ability to reason, your strength and the ability think your problems through rationally.  As with No 3, whatever actually happens, you can deal with, you can always find a way through, whereas you will almost never be able to see a way through your imagined scenarios.
4. It’s not necessarily your oldest friends that will be there for you when you’re truly in need - I found that help came not from those whom I would have expected, but from places and people that I would never have imagined.  It’s easy to think that your friends move and grow at the same rate as you do, however, that isn’t always the case and you may find that when the chips are down, their path has taken them to such a different place than yours, that they can no longer empathise which your current situation.  That’s no reflection on either of you; it’s just part of the change process. 

During this time, I found reading Eckhart Tolle’s two brilliant books again, The Power of Now and A New Earth immensely useful and comforting.  If you haven’t read anything by him before, I recommend reading A New Earth first as the concepts explained in The Power of Now can be a little difficult to grasp at first, especially if you haven’t read too many self-development books. I also had a couple of coaching sessions which Brad Yates (whom I’ve mentioned before) and his take on my situation was, “How can you help people as a coach if you’ve never been through tough times or adversity yourself?  It’s all about the lessons you needed to learn” … Good point well made I thought.

I’m happy to say that this year is different already, it even feels different.  I’ve come through many trials and tribulations and I’m happy to say that things are now looking decidedly rosy.  I’ll potentially hit tough times again in the future, but at least I have a bigger toolkit to deal with what’s thrown at me next time!

In conclusion, I think life is about living and learning and changing the things that aren’t working – and if that doesn’t work, try something else.  After all, my favourite saying is, “Always do what you’ve always done, always get what you’ve always got!”  For me, I’m removing doubt, I’m removing worry and as much negativity from my life as I possibly can.  Only positive thoughts (as much as is humanly possible) for me going forward and to continue with my aim of helping as many people as I possibly can.

If any of this resonates with you and you would like to discuss anything with me privately and confidentially, please do not hesitate to get in touch - info@whatnextconsultancy.co.uk


It's nearly Friday, so have a wonderful weekend!

Jo

The ‘My Life’s Worse than Yours’ Competition

I met a friend recently who I haven’t seen for quite some time, in fact, it’s been over a year, so we had quite a lot of catching up to do.  Now as you can probably imagine, I try to be quite careful in any conversations not to be negative and if something negative has happened to me (which it does as often as it does to everyone else) I always try to see it from a positive point of view.  After all, we can’t always change the things that happen to us, but we can choose how we feel and react to them.

I was telling this person about some particularly trying things that had happened in the intervening time since we last met, which I hoped where tapered by the positives that I could see eg lessons I’d learned from those situations.  However, this seemed to open the floodgates for my friend to tell me just how awful her life was in comparison to mine.  She actually seemed to get quite excited about telling me how awful things had been.  Her body language changed and became more animated; her voice changed pitch and tone and speeded up considerably as she regaled all the horrors that she had dealt with - all in an attempt to persuade me how much worse her life was than mine. 

I found this really fascinating and actually quite disturbing.  I know I’ve mentioned this before in other posts, but why would want to win a ‘my life is worse than yours’ competition?  I certainly wouldn’t and yet it’s quite common place.  Some people just can’t seem to resist being the one that’s most hard done to, or who has had the worst life.

After our meeting, as I thought more about what had taken place, I took to my Facebook page to canvas opinion as to why my FB friends thought that people behaved in this way.  The general consensus was that it was attention seeking.  Some people just love attention no matter whether it’s positive or negative and in fact some people just love to be negative and actually define themselves by their negativity.  It‘s something that we usually learn in childhood.  Some children get little reaction if they are good and positive when growing up, but quickly learn that if something awful (perceived or otherwise) happens to them, then they get lots of attention … the more awful or dramatic, the more attention they receive.  That learned behaviour then sticks with them into adult life.

So the next time you find yourself getting into that, “Well my life’s worse than yours” discussion/competition, stop, smile to yourself and be happy to let the other person win – after all, is that something that you really want to win?

Jo