A conversation I had recently with a friend about some events from my past, and some experiences at a recent Rooftop Leadership Live event reminded me of the following except from one of James Clear’s 3-2-1 Thursday newsletters:

"The events of your past are fixed. The meaning of your past is not.

The influence of every experience in your life is determined by the meaning you assign to it. 

Assign a more useful meaning to your past and it becomes easier to take a more useful action in the present."

You cannot change what has happened to you. You cannot change how other people have treated you. You cannot change the words others have said to you. You can accept this reality with resignation and a victim mentality, or you can understand that while you do not control those experiences you do control the meaning you assign to them, the power you give them and the stories you tell yourself about what happened. 

There were many times in my life when the meaning I assigned to events caused me to embrace victim thinking and get caught up in the “blame game”. I convinced myself that life was unfair and what happened to me was everyone else’s fault. This resulted in me dropping out of high school at age 16 and living in the back seat of a 1964 Plymouth for months. At 18 I was a pack a day smoker, 90 to 100 pounds overweight, I had a grade 10 education and was working in a warehouse job that paid me $325.00 a month and this was a step up from the meat packing plant job. 

Over time I began to understand that I could assign different meaning to those events and that I had the power to make changes in my attitude and my life. I didn’t know it at the time and did not have the words, but I began to apply the W.I.N. philosophy to my life. That does not mean that I did not slip back into the victim mentality and the blame game over the years. When I did however, I knew that I could make changes to my thinking to get out of that. 

“Others can choose to make you a target. Only you can choose to be a victim.”

Gavin de Becker

When you accept that you control the meaning, power and stories attached to those events, you develop the understanding that being a victim is a choice. 

“Three existential themes are at the core of posttraumatic growth. The first is the recognition that life is uncertain and that things change. This amounts to a tolerance of uncertainty that, in turn, reflects the ability to embrace it as a fundamental tenet of human existence. The second is psychological mindfulness, which reflects self-awareness and an understanding of how one’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are related to each other as well as a flexible attitude toward personal change. The third is acknowledgment of personal agency, which entails a sense of responsibility for the choices one makes in life and an awareness that choices have consequences.”

Stephen Joseph, What Doesn’t Kill Us

You get to choose the meaning you assign to events in your life.

What’s Important Now? Choose meaning that allows you to grow and move forward better off for the experiences. 

Take care.

Brian Willis

www.lifesmostpowerfulquestion.com. Maximizing human potential through Life's Most Powerful Question - What's Important Now?

www.daretobegreatleadership.com The online Dare to Be Great: Strategies for Creating a Culture of Leading workshop was created to help aspiring leaders and frontline leaders on their leadership journey. Subscribe to the weekly blog while you are there. 

 

If you found value in this post please share this with your friends, family and co-workers.