So I’d like to ask you a question. What do you do when things or events don’t turn out the way you wanted them to? And that’s a crucial, important question, because through life, lots of stuff has got to go differently than what we wished for or hoped for or wanted. And especially when we try to pursue something different, when we try to give ourselves a new identity, when we try to go out and do different things in life than what we used to.
When we want to express different things, when we want to express emotions in different ways, when we want to have different opinions, whenever we want to create change in our lives and in ourselves, we will experience that. We’ve done all this work and we hope expect wherever we place that needle, that things are going to turn out some specific way and they won’t.
Well, they may. They may very, very well turn out that way, but they may not. And what we do when things turn out differently than what we wanted them to. That’s really where we are put to the test. So what do you do when things don’t turn out? Do you give up? Do you blame? Do you get curious?
Do you get angry or do it get sad? Or do you feel powerless? What’s your reaction or reactions? Typically, we have one or two of those that we go to on a regular basis, so to speak. That is like the standard setting for us. So try to examine that, because if we go to the powerless, for instance, whenever we try to walk the path of change of life or we want to challenge ourselves and we experience that setback, if we go to powerless every time, if we go too disappointed, if we go to blaming events or circumstance or other people or the weather, or maybe even, we are going to end up in that place
where we eventually are going to look at ourselves and just go, I’m not capable. I can’t do this. I’m not the kind of person who, whatever the case may be, which is not the truth. And I’m going to get back to the thing about truth later, a little bit later in this film, because we all have the capability, but we have different mindsets.
We have different ways of looking at this, these setbacks. And I have three short points that I’m going to go through here. The first of them is how do you express your emotions? How do you talk to yourself or to others about this setback? Be aware of the words you use because if you go into, he let me down, I am disappointed he he didn’t fulfill what he has promised.
You know, we go into all that kind of language, his such whatever colorful language you might want to use when we go there. And if we tense up, you, we lose our brows and we maybe clench our our jaws and our teeth and we tighten up in the body. It looks like anger, which may be real and which may be well-placed in that situation, but it’s not going to serve us long time if that’s the place we go every time life doesn’t work out the way we want.
So beware of the words because they are very, very important. Words creates emotions. And whenever we use words that make us feel less than or disempowered, that’s what we are going to feel. And from a disempowered place, it’s very difficult for us to come back and to try to take that step again. Whatever we tighten up in the body, you might the way also go to sadness where it’s like, I know it, I it always happens to me.
I am going to get out of that state because you can’t stand looking at that for very long, I suppose. But you get the general picture. The body’s low in energy. We are looking down. We are talking about how stuff always happens that we cannot cope with and that we are a person who such and such. All those stories, those words, the physicality, the tonality, those are the three major components.
And in this first part, be very much aware of what words you use, the tonality, how you express it and your physicality, because those things together form the emotion that we feel in a given moment and in a given experience. And by change of any of those three, and ideally by all of those three, you can feel totally different.
And maybe even empowered to try to take a new bold step or a different bold step. So that’s the first of the three points I have. The second one is look, look at the circumstance, look at whatever is happening and tell yourself the truth, Right. Because you may be standing, waiting for the train. And somebody was supposed to come and see you.
You had some kind of date or whatever. And this person doesn’t show up because the translate or maybe this person just isn’t on the train or arriving at the moment that you had agreed upon. Now, where do you go with that? The thing is that always men are always like this. Women always do this, other people always do.
They they never live up to the the agreements we’ve we’ve made. I’m always left standing here alone and disappointed. But what is the truth? You don’t know at that moment? The truth may be that this person that you had an agreement with is a sociopath or a psychopath or whatever. And if that’s the truth, you have to handle it in a completely different way and maybe get out of there faster than you can think or account to five.
But that’s another thing. Usually the truth is that someone was delayed because of good reasons. Maybe something happened at work. Maybe someone had a heart attack at the train station, maybe there are children cold, maybe so many things can happen. And I will really encourage you to look at what is the plain truth without emotion, without judgment, without blame, without any of those things.
Look very clearly at what is the truth here, because that will relieve a lot of the disappointment, the anger, the frustration, the powerlessness, all of those things to figure out what is actually really going on in the world or in this specific situation. The last thing and yeah, maybe the most important, I don’t know. They are all important.
Important. But this one is really important. That is the meaning we create out of things. I’ve been talking about the words that this always happens to me. People, they never accept my needs. When we say those kinds of things, we attach meaning to what’s happening. Meaning here I am again. People are always letting me down, right? That’s one meaning we can put through it.
The meaning is that I’m always put in this position where I’m powerless and other people, they decide what’s going to happen in my life, which there may be kind of a true thing. But the more you tell yourself that story, the more of a self-fulfilling prophecy it’s going to become. So be very careful about the meaning. And actually, no matter what happens, we are able to look at it and influence the meaning that our subconscious mind will give it meaning.
If some painful event happens. And we keep giving the meaning to this event that I’m a victim, that I’m powerless, that no matter what I do, I cannot influence my own life. Right? The more we are going to believe it and those meanings are disempowering. So always, always ask yourself, what could what else could this mean? What sells?
What else is possible? What could the meaning of this be? What meaning will I choose to put to this thing? What do I specifically consciously choose to label as the meaning of this event? Because that’s one of the things we can do as humans. We have that consciousness where we can actually influence the meaning we give things. So those are three things that you can be curious about and to work with.
They are very, very powerful and each of them will influence the way you feel about events. And to get back to where I started, whenever we want to move out on this path of change or journey of personal exploration or widening our comfort zone or our lives, we will encounter setbacks. We will encounter that we had built all this or we had done all this, and it didn’t go the way we planned it or we wished for.
It will happen. The defining thing is not if it’s going to happen or not to, or to avoid it because we can’t avoid it. The defining factor is how do you deal with it? What are you going to do whenever life throws you something that you couldn’t catch? Right? So those are just three small things you can do, but very powerfully, because what I wish for you is that you can move out in your life and start to building that version of your life where you feel fulfilled, where your values are aligned, where you are, your identity shines through in the choices you make and the life you live and on the path to that.
And when we are on the path of doing that, we are going to experience setbacks. So we need to be very conscious about how we react to those so that we are in charge of life. And it’s not life that’s in charge of you or I.
