How to Turn Adversity Into Personal Empowerment
There was a point in my life when it seemed like everything was going wrong and it seemed like one bad thing lead to another bad thing in a never-ending cascade of bad karma. I kept punishing myself with the question: Why me? Or Why does this always happen to me and not anyone else? I tortured myself by reliving past mistakes and I spent countless hours dwelling on what I should have done and I constantly beat myself up daily over these questions and self-criticisms. I eventually hit rock bottom with this type of thinking and I didn’t realize until I hit rock bottom that such a mind-frame only works to manifest more pain, missed opportunities and bad luck into my life. To make a financial analogy to my experience, I had essentially run myself into the ground with emotional debt and ended up bankrupt.
A Turning Point
After hitting rock bottom, it finally occurred to me that I was manifesting my own “bad luck,” or negative karma, by focusing on my own negative intentions and not taking responsibility for my own life. I had relinquished all the control I had over my life and my destiny by blaming others and taking the role of the “victim.” I was trying to control the uncontrollable environment that I was in and when I was not able to exert any control, I ended up feeling helpless and powerless.
It was then that I realized that I had little or no control over that environment that I was in. I could not control the unexpected events that happened in my life, nor could I control another person’s way of thinking. I realized that I was no different than anyone else in this regard. Things were not just happening to me—those same things were happening to everyone around me in some way, shape or form. The difference was that I was taking those events personally and spending most of my time and energy on manifesting negative intentions, rather than moving forward with my life.
Taking Responsibility for your Life
Through extensive research and from my own personal experiences, the science of manifesting success is really not that complicated. I don’t think anyone can argue the point that everyone will at some point in their lives encounter adversity. Those that ultimately fail in the game called life are the ones that remain stuck in the past, always blaming others for their misfortunes and playing the part of the victim. While this might deflect some of the pain experienced at the time, it is also very disempowering because it leaves you helpless and with no control over your own life. While you can’t change the fact that negative events will impact your life at some point, you can change how you personally view and handle those negative experiences.
Now some people say to focus on the good things in every bad situation. I personally find that difficult to do because inherently some events are so bad that there might be no good in that situation or it might be so painful that the good is too impossible to see. Instead, I advocate analyzing the situation by asking yourself the question, “What lesson can I extract from this experience that will help me in the future?” By using past negative experiences as learning lessons, you effectively move yourself out of the victim mode and move yourself into the self-coaching mode as you apply that negative experience into a useful learning tool that can be used in a positive way towards your own personal growth and development.
So, as an example, let’s say that a personal relationship ended in a way that was less than pleasant. Someone who is destined to fail at life would blame the other person for ruining the relationship or for victimizing them. This negative manifestation of emotional energy only generates additional bad luck or karma to fall onto that person’s life because they become so focused on blaming and diverting responsibility that they miss out on all the opportunities for the good things that inevitably come along their way. It’s totally the rule of getting more of what you focus on in life. In that same example, a person who has the ability to succeed in life will take a look at the same situation and tell themselves, “Yeah, the break up sucked, but what I learned from it was x,y,z.” This is empowering because now the person is taking responsibility for their own life and turning this otherwise negative event into a lesson that will aid their future. Just remember that you have little or no control over your environment, but you have every possible control over how you deal with that environment. Highly successful people retain and exercise their own inner-control when their environment knocks them down. Conversely, the people who fail at life relinquish their power to control their own thoughts and instead focus vainly on how to control their uncontrollable environment.
Key Points:
• Accept the fact that you have no control over your environment or anyone else. The only thing you have control over is how you handle yourself when the uncontrollable environment impacts your life.
• Remember that pain, anger, and negative emotions damages you more than anyone else around you.
•Blaming only turns you into the helpless victim and it turns the other person(s) into the villain. While this might ease the pain initially, it damages your ability to move forward towards obtaining viable solutions.
• Stop being a victim and take responsibility for your life and the actions you make.
• Don’t beat yourself up emotionally for mistakes made in the past. Mistakes are how we learn and grow as individuals. Instead, extract the lessons learned from those mistakes that can be applied to your future.
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