Читать книгу Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 17

The powerful understanding contained in Secret Number Two can radically change your experience of life in every moment. Rather than judging yourself and your life based on how perfectly you are fitting into a picture of how you think things “should” be, you begin to evaluate yourself and your life based on how much you are growing, how much you are learning. This is the magic formula for making every day of your life a great day.

When you think the purpose of life is to do or get or accomplish, you will always feel like a failure when things don’t turn out as planned. When you understand that life is a classroom in which success means growing into the best human being possible, you begin evaluating yourself and your experiences from a totally different point of view.

Each day of your life, you consciously or unconsciously evaluate yourself—how did I do today? For instance, suppose you work in sales for a living, and you have a week where you encounter one difficult customer after another, the result being that you close no sales and make no commissions. At the end of that week you would probably think, “What a lousy week! I didn’t close one deal. I am so disappointed in myself. What is wrong with me?”

If you’re evaluating yourself based on the premise that the purpose of your life is to close deals, or to make money, or to achieve certain material goals, then yes, you had a lousy week. But what if you decided to evaluate yourself based on the premise that the purpose of your life is to grow? Maybe during that week, in spite of how obnoxious those potential customers were, you maintained a cheerful and kind attitude. Maybe during that week, in spite of how disheartened you felt, you didn’t give up, resort to stuffing your face with junk food, or getting down on yourself. Maybe you exhibited patience, you were compassionate with people, you kept going, you didn’t lose your temper with anybody, you didn’t go off your diet, you didn’t do anything unhealthy to cover up what you were feeling.

So now how does the week look to you? It was a fabulous week, a triumphant week! You truly fulfilled your purpose that week by learning, meeting your challenges with steadiness and perseverance. You may not have achieved the material rewards you wanted, but you achieved something far more profound and lasting—you grew into a better human being.

Have you been feeling bad about yourself lately? Do you look at your life and conclude that you aren’t doing as well as you think you should? Perhaps you haven’t been looking at your life from the correct point of view. Perhaps you are missing your own great achievements because you’re judging yourself by standards that don’t even apply to you anymore. Secret Number Two suggests that it is time to change your paradigm of what success means to you.

Instead of defining your success by what you have achieved or acquired, why not begin defining your success by how much you are growing each day?

So how do you begin? Take your “should” list and throw it away. Then, replace it with just one commitment:

“Today I want to grow into the best human being I can be.”

Tell yourself, “I want to learn as much as I can and grow as much as I can with whatever comes my way.” Then no matter what happens to you on the outside, it can be a great day, a successful day, based on how you are handling the day on the inside.