Every time an event occurs in our lives, two things are present: the event itself i.e. the incident, the experience, the thing that happened or did not happen, and the emotions associated with the event i.e. how it made you feel whether sad, hurt, anger, guilt or fear. Events also bring positive emotions like joy, serenity, pride, etc but that’s the subject of another post 🙂
When you recall the event, you will feel the emotion. When you relive the event in your mind, you relive the emotion. That’s how we are made. How we feel as a result of a negative event stays with us as long as it wants. Weeks, months, years, and for some, decades and decades. Can you remember an event that produced negative emotions?
Different people will deal differently with these emotions yet there is a way to remove the pain and that is to discover the third thing present in all experiences: the lessons from the event.
It’s not easy to discover the lessons on your own
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with the negative emotions you feel and more often than not, we get bogged down with asking all the wrong questions, especially the “Why me?” question: Why did this happen to me?
There are no answers to this question. It just begs more and more questions.
Despite knowing that this is a time to be objective and positive, you don’t know where to begin. Talking about it to someone may lighten the load, and you may feel relieved, but only for a moment.
You’re looking for clarity but you can’t see the trees for the forest. And often, it can be a dense and dark forest. Things might just seem impossible.
How do you learn the lessons?
How does one begin to discover the lessons when something happens which has a negative impact on us? It has to do with asking the right questions. The wrong questions will drag you deeper and deeper into the spiral — the right questions will likely lead you to a breakthrough moment when you see something you hadn’t seen before and come to a new realisation.
The experience never changed, it’s still the same thing because it already happened. But how you see it now has changed. It brings with it a new emotion. You feel lightened.
The wrong questions begin with “Why”
For example, “Why did this happen?” The answer to this question will always begins with “Because….” And that’s not a lesson. Just justification. If we stay on this path and keep drilling down by asking more “Why…” questions we will just get deeper and deeper into the cause of the event. We may understand it more, but it doesn’t mean we will discover the lesson.
The right questions begin with “How”
When we ask “How” questions, our minds look for answers, and for a moment, we take a step outside the emotion. For example, “How did this happen?” We will discover some action we took or didn’t take. And then we ask another question, like “How can I do it better next time?” And that’s how we start to discover the lessons.
“Why” questions disempower us. “How” questions empower us.
When we feel lost and we lose focus, we become more and more demotivated. It’s a downward spiral. Nothing changes and we keep looking around, waiting for something else to happen to change the way we are feeling. Feeling lost and stuck is disempowering, to say the least.
When we reflect on the event and can start asking ourselves some really basic questions like, “How can I move forward?” or “How can I stop focussing on this in a negative way?” it can actually start empowering us — because we are enquiring towards solutions. It’s empowering us to do something even if it’s just changing the way we think.
We still remember the event – whatever it was, professional or personal: losing a job, not achieving a goal, getting a bad result in an exam, ending a relatonship, a bad experience – but it affects us differently than before.
Once we understand the lessons – our takeaway from an experience – we can detach ourselves from the emotion and move on.
In a nutshell, negative experiences will always be there. It’s outside our control and it happens. But we can decide if we will allow them to empower us or disempower us.
Whoever said it was easy to do this on your own was being oversimplistic. It takes time to develop a new way of looking at things, a new way of thinking. It’s a process of self-discovery and that is really what takes time.
