How many times have you looked at your life and asked “why does this keep happening to me?” During that moment of internal questioning, you feel like a victim to your circumstance and even feel a sense of unfairness or unbalance with the world around you because what happens to you is just not what you want for yourself. If not that, then maybe you feel a sense of anger towards those around you who participate in playing out the scenarios of misfortune and unrest with you. It must be their fault you think. It must be because everyone else is wrong. It must be because others just can’t value what’s in front of them. Does that sound familiar? Have I struck a cord down your memory chorus of sadness? Here’s a revelation for you. The reason why you keep reliving the same scenarios or encountering the same situation over and over again is not because the universe is trying to punish you for something but rather it’s trying to teach you a lesson. Pay attention silly! Learn your lessons and only then can you move on.
To be clear, I am not here to pretend to have all of the answers but I have learned once again through personal experience and observation as well as research that life is a series of lessons which we go through to help us become the best versions of ourselves during the time we are here. I truly believe that every person born on this earth is capable or doing something great and living the life they dreamed of. The differences between those that do accomplish such as life and those that don’t is that the ones that do, refuse to become victims to their circumstances, refuse to accept the norm of “what is dealt” to them, refuse to allow others’ opinions dissuade them from achieving their goals, refuse to continue living in a negative cycle and make the necessary decisions to change their future.
I believe that in order to be successful at moving towards greatness and achieving your goals, you must first open your eyes and see the world around you. If you are not happy with the life you are living, what would you change? What would ideal look like? What kind of job would you have? What kind of car would you drive? What would it feel like? Look like? Once you have seen all of that, you must also see what in your current situation would get in the way of any of that. Let me stop right here and say that if your ideal life is to live bar hopping and drinking while surrounded by gorgeous women or men and driving a Farrari but your spouse and kids are in the way….. you need to reevaluate yourself as a human being all together and then come back here. Otherwise, if you are unhappy with your job, the trend in relationships you engage in, the friends you keep, or the environment you live in, then take time to list out the reasons why you feel that these situations continue to live on in your life.
In my case, I had a series of bad relationships where I was left feeling undervalued as a human being and begging for scraps of attention from those I would get involved with. I realized that due to the abusive environment I was raised in, I was always trying to please others and finding ways to prove my value to them in the hopes that I would get the attention or loving gestures that one would expect to get from another. I always felt that I would be going in circles with my friendships too. Looking back, I have carried many friendships which to this day I had nothing in common with and really could not call friends as I knew I would not be able to count on them when I truly needed them. I had to realize that I was just trying to surround myself with people in order to block out some of the loneliness I was feeling. However, these individuals would also take advantage of my giving nature (part of the people pleaser in me) and that continued to happen until one day I took accountability for my life and my actions and realized that this environment was going to continue for me until I decided that I wanted something better for myself. The same was true for work and my living situation. I needed to slow down and figure out what I was doing wrong in order to change the direction of my life.
Statistically speaking, based on my background and upbringing, I should have been a teen mom and high school drop out or tried some form of drug throughout my youth and into my adult years. However, without truly understanding the value of my decisions and thoughts, at an early age I knew I needed to make better decisions for myself or I would end up in the same place. The same has continued to be true to this day now that I am in my early forties. Except now I realize that life is a series of lessons that I am being taught and the one I am in will prepare me for the next. Everything in life is a series of lessons. The key is to understand that at times we need to stand still and observe what is this situation trying to teach you. What lesson do you need to learn? What scenario keeps happening to you over and over again? My pinnacle moment of growth over the last few years has been that I needed to value myself as a human being and improve my communication. Not just the way I communicated with others but they way I was allowing others to communicate with me. Up until a few years ago, I would allow even the closest people to me speak to me any kind of way and allow them to put me in a negative space which in turn created the need in me to prove my worth yet again and allow myself to feel undervalued because I allowed them to step all over me and make them have power over me with their words. This is absolutely unacceptable. What really struck a chord with me as an adult was when I realized that I had picked up the same bad behavior and began doing it myself. I did not wanna become like the people that I grew up around who created so much damage which I am still recovering from. I did not want those that I loved to feel undervalued. I did not want my kids to feel undervalued. I did not want my coworkers and colleagues to feel undervalued. So while this is still a work in progress, it is something that I am very well aware of. Once again, now that I have taken accountability for it, my relationships have changed as have my interactions with colleagues and even my relationship with my kids.
This could very well be the most important lesson I have learned to this day but when you combine it with all the other lessons I have learned throughout my life and my career, the difficult moments that come up seemed to be easier to handle with a better sense of resilience. Like in a video game, when you build-up a skill only then can you level up. So pay attention silly! Take a moment to reflect at what the patterns are in your life look for the common denominator and most often it will require you taking accountability for something you are doing or creating, or allowing in your life to let these patterns continue repeating themselves and in essence keeping you from moving forward.
Ambition Freak 