If you want your bad experiences not only to prevent you from doing the same nonsense, but also to bring you to significant growth, I suggest you embrace a philosophy of life that embraces the following behaviors.
Choose a positive life attitude
If you can maintain a positive life attitude, you are in the best position to manage bad experiences and turn them into positive growth. You can’t control much of what happens to you in life. However, you can control your attitude towards it. You can choose to overcome your situations and refuse to allow negative experiences to undermine who you are and what you believe. And you can decide to find something positive to learn in the face of negative events.
Here are some statements that will help you reflect to move towards a positive attitude.
- Life is full of good and evil.
- I cannot control a part of good and evil: this is life.
- If I have a positive attitude, good and evil will improve.
- If I have a negative attitude, good and evil will get worse.
- For these reasons I choose a positive attitude.
Embrace and develop your creativity
Creativity begins at the end of your comfort zone. When you feel the pain of bad experiences, creativity gives you the opportunity to transform that pain into positive energy. The secret is to harness the energy that comes from adrenaline or anger and use it to solve and learn lessons. When you have a bad experience, instead of letting yourself be discouraged or angry, try to find a way to stimulate your creativity to achieve your OKR.
Embrace the value of negative experiences
It is much easier to see something positive in a negative experience only long after. It is difficult to face the negative experience with a positive mindset at the moment. However, if you can do it, you will always be able to learn something from it. Where there is no struggle, there is no progress. Dealing with difficulties is inevitable. Learning from them is optional. Base your learning by understanding that difficulties always present opportunities to learn and act accordingly.
Make good changes after learning from bad experiences
It often takes a bad experience to deal with the changes we need to make in our lives. A curve in the middle of the road is not the end of the road unless you fail to do it. When negative experiences create strong feelings in us, we either face feelings and try to change or try to escape. It is the old instinct of struggle or escape. To make positive changes we must train ourselves to fight. The next time you find yourself in the midst of a bad experience, remind yourself that you are on top of an opportunity to be able to change and grow. Whether you succeed will depend on how you react to your experience and the resulting change. Let your emotions be the catalyst for change, think about how to change to make sure you make good choices and then take action.
Take responsibility for your life
You have to take responsibility for your life and the choices you make. It’s almost impossible to grow significantly when you don’t take responsibility for yourself and your life. No matter what you have lived in your life – or what you are going through – you have the opportunity to grow from it. Sometimes it is very difficult to see the opportunity in the midst of pain, but it is there. You must be willing not only to look for it, but to pursue it. The next time you’re dealing with a bad experience, look at it as an opportunity to learn. Not only will you have a better chance of avoiding it in the future, but it will make you grow in the process.
