I was asked yesterday how have all the major changes I’ve been through in the past eight years changed me? What unique life skills emerge from changing everything at one time?
I would say I have developed two important skills: resourcefulness and resilience, as a result of changing my life. What do I mean by this? I mean that I have learned to count on my own ability to find answers quickly when I need them and further, I have learned to trust in my own ability to survive through any major change that life throws at me.
This reminds me of the main character, Jamal in “Slumdog Millionarie.” That kid is truly the most resourceful and resilient child I have ever seen. Why? Because he has to be to survive even one day in the uncertainty of his day-to-day existence in the slums of Mumbai. When life demands it, most of us find a way to get by until things settle down a bit.
Another life skill that naturally develops out of crisis is humility. When your life hits bottom, there is no more room for false pride. You must confront the fact that you are no better than anyone else. You experience failures, you feel like a loser, you need to find the strength within to pick yourself up and go on.
I also established an improved sense of self-respect and self-responsibility when the world started disrespecting me. Through my own experience of loss and depression, came a new pride in what I could accomplish if I put my heart and soul into it. I finally knew that nobody would ever again have the power to convince me that I was not valuable as a person, that I was useless and disposable. And it was my responsibility to never let that happen again!
Optimism was also an outgrowth of my past few years of change. I learned that future changes may improve my life and they may make it worse for a while, but either way change is a constant. That’s why I say: Hang on it all changes and to resist change is to suffer.
But I believe the most important value that I have developed as a result of my own trials and tribulations is gratefulness. When I lost so much, I recognized how I had taken so much for granted for most of my life. I had assumed that I would always be able to find a good job fairly easily, I would always have a fine home, and money for whatever I needed next. This assumption was incorrect and created false pride. Now I know the world is changing at every moment of every day and anything can happen.
Anything can happen. We can lose everything at anytime, but we can also gain so much from the experience. Within every misfortune there is a lesson worth learning. The challenge is to find the prize within the misfortune and use it to pursue a life more in line with our deepest needs and purpose.
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Wow, such a great story! Sounds like you have really grown from your experience. I too have faced some difficult times- your same feelings and lessons learned sound very familiar to me. One thing that I would have to say helped me make changes in my life for the better is one that I read in a book titled,”Little Voice Mastery” by Blair Singer.
Blair Singer showed me how to break through self-sabotaging habits, how to stop the debilitating chatter in my brain so I can attract what I want now. I have learned to resurrect the hero inside of me.