“There are no mistakes in life, only lessons. There is no such thing as a negative experience, only opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of self-mastery.”- Robin Sharma.
Life is the greatest gift of all and too precious and short to be wasted. It should not be lived with any kind of regret or taken for granted. You can choose to discard any reason or excuse you’ve been giving yourself to lead a life that is far below your standards. No matter where you are in life right now, no matter who you are, or how old you are, it’s never too late to be who you are meant to be. It’s never too late to do anything you wanted to do, be it pursuing your passion or learning a new skill or falling in love or forgiving someone or apologizing to someone or doing anything that brings more fulfillment and happiness in your life.
Taking responsibility is the starting point for any change in your life. It is looking inside and realizing that if you want the world around you to get better, you will have to get better first. You must take responsibility for yourself and your environment and invoke the positive changes you desire most. Every moment, you are presented with the possibility of changing your future and taking responsibility empowers you to feel in control of your destiny.
Our life doesn't just "happen." Whether we know it or not, it is carefully designed by us with the choices we make. And knowing this gives us a perfect opportunity to do things differently to produce more positive results. You have the ability to choose how you perceive any event in your life, and you can exercise this power every moment of your life. You can choose to appreciate what you have. You can choose to make time for yourself. You can choose to spend time with positive people. You can choose to persevere with your goals.
When you become aware of the choices you make each moment, you feel free to choose thoughts and actions that will benefit you and not harm you or hurt you. Within your choices, lie all the tools and resources you need to design the life of your dreams. You need to choose what the best is for you while ensuring the choice is ecological for those around you!
And to be truly complete as a person, one who is inwardly aware and outwardly successful, one must focus on mastery in all the four dimensions of life - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. And one of the beauties of life is that it drives us to constantly expand and grow in all these dimensions. As we all need more choices, freedom, and certainty about what we can achieve and experience in our life, we must have complete clarity on the workings of the mind and the workings of life. And we must strive to make progress and achieve balance in all the areas of our life that matter to us the most.
One of the finest beliefs I have developed and that has helped me to enjoy all my life experiences is that there are no bad experiences! No matter what I go through in life whether it's a challenging experience or a pleasurable one, every experience provides me with something of value. I have conditioned myself to embrace whatever life brings to me and internalize it in the form of an inspiring mantra, I want to live by.
When I view life as a classroom, it's not a dull place, where we sit on some forward facing desks and listen to a not so interesting teacher. But it is more of a workshop where the learning is experiential. I like to think that the workshop of life is perfectly organized so that we learn what we need to learn, when we need to learn it, and just the way we need to learn it. The operative word in all this is - ‘need’, and not ‘want’.
Life's lessons come in various forms and ways. Sometimes what we need to know, we learn it formally by attending a workshop or by reading a book or any such way. Sometimes we learn in an informal, seemingly coincidental and unexpected way, such as overhearing a comment in an elevator, or a friend's remark, or an inspiring line of a song from a passing radio. The good news is that we learn all we need to know eventually. For some people, however, eventually is not soon enough.
We tend to forget to acknowledge the lesson, especially when things don’t go our way and tend to stick to the emotions. However, we need to take away the lessons and release the emotions that can impact us adversely beyond our intellectual understanding. As we navigate change and challenges, the most important question to ask is: "What's the lesson here?"
The worst days in our lives can be the most powerful in terms of the lessons we choose to learn from them. Our bad times bring many blessings with them like the beauty of wisdom, strength of character, invincible courage and deeper compassion. We are what we are, not because of our good times but because of our bad times.
Through life’s experiences, we have the opportunities for change and self-realization. And one of the most fascinating aspects about life is that we cannot escape from the lessons, it wants to teach us. The greatest lesson we are here to learn is how to live a life of happiness. As we all deserve to experience an extraordinary quality of life, let’s pledge to be good students and learn our lessons in the best possible ways so that we never again settle for anything less than we could be!