Have you ever realized that whenever you want to work on something about yourself, the world provides you with all kinds of opportunities to do better?
You might see that the same kind of pattern keeps showing up in your life. You always find yourself in the same type of situation or maybe you feel like nothing is ever going right for you.
And sometimes you feel a little psychic?
You’re like, “I knew that would happen. These kinds of things always happen to me.”
And for sure, that’s one way to look at life. We can believe that life is just happening to us.
But what if we switched it around?
What if we decided that life is happening for us?
Instead of going down the whole predictability path of all the bad stuff that seems to find its way to us, what if we started embracing the way life predictably gives us opportunities all the time to practice getting better?
What if we decided to switch our perspective, and create our own experiences?
If you want to become more patient, there are opportunities coming at you all day long to practice, right?
I was at a yoga class last night, and because it’s inside a large gym, people tend to come in late to the class. The class started and this girl was talking on the phone while in child’s pose. And then another two ladies came in late, and one put their mat next to mine. And then two guys came in and put their mats down right in front of me. I kept moving my mat to make space for everyone while simultaneously trying to follow the flow sequence. The ladies never stopped disrupting the class and left early too.
It was all incredibly distracting, but I also had this feeling that it was a total opportunity to choose to stay in the “flow.”
What better place to practice patience than in a yoga class, right?
I won’t say I was entirely successful with not letting it get to me, but I did like how it instantly made me think about how we’re always given these moments to choose again, and decide how we want to respond.
And the best part of these moments is that they give us feedback, if we decide to pay attention to them.
If we get upset about other people’s decisions, we know how that plays out. It affects our moods.
I could let these five people ruin my yoga class – people I probably will never see again. Or, I could choose to stay present and enjoy the class.
And that’s the thing… We tend to think that other people are ruining our experiences.
But the thing I’ve learned is that other people don’t get to be in control of that.
If we want other people to have that kind of control over our experiences, that’s our choice. But it’s so important to remember that we have the choice over how we want to think and feel.
I can’t control other people’s actions but I can control how it is going to affect my experience.
I believe that we have a lot of power to affect the world around us through the way we think and feel, and awareness over that has been life-changing.
Things actually change in your life when you stop forcing, resisting or allowing other people to control your experience.
So, now I think about how am I speaking, how I’m feeling, and how I’m responding. Am I bringing good things into my life – or am I basically manifesting a bunch of garbage into my life?
If I’m seeing the same old patterns come up, and I’m still handling them in the same old way, these patterns will keep resurfacing.
So, these days, I try to pay attention to the patterns and choose differently.
I’ve been working on this because when you really think about it, it’s the obvious solution to what life throws our way, right?
When you’ve tried something over and over again and it’s not giving you the results you want… why are you still choosing it?
We make those same choices, because it feels safe and familiar. We don’t know what’s going to happen when we choose differently, right? We’re not sure how that’ll play out.
So we prefer to go the safe route even though we know it doesn’t serve us but eventually, doesn’t it get so tiring to see things play out the same again and again? Life is too short for it to play out like Groundhog Day.
Start making different choices. Start being aware of the power you hold over your life.
You control so much more than you think you do.
Life will always throw us challenges, and we can choose to see them as opportunities to show up and figure out how to handle it the way that we want to, the way that feels best to us.
And when you catch yourself blaming other people, and believing that they’re the problem, take a moment to reflect.
We’re not always going to get this right. People and circumstances are going to get us down.
But we can always remind ourselves that we are getting stronger with each time we’re challenged; we’re always learning and growing from every experience we have.
Instead of letting the world get us down, decide that you are in charge of creating your own world.