|
Today's
Meditation:
I've always
suffered from what some would call low frustration
tolerance. When I planned for something to happen or
planned to do something and the plans went awry, I used to
get extremely frustrated and often very discouraged.
I usually felt that I had failed at something, that it was
my fault that things hadn't worked out. It's taken
me a long time to learn that when plans fall through a
first time, there's almost always something there for me
to learn so that the second time the chances will be
stronger that I'll meet with success.
When
I look at unsuccessful plans as learning experiences, they
change significantly. They're very different in that
they're now situations that I can learn from, and as I
learn, I make myself stronger in many ways. When I
learn, I can take new information and ideas and turn them
into future successes simply because I tried something and
learned from the effort-- whether I actually achieved what
I was trying or not.
When
we're little kids, we try things all the time and fail at
them, and we have no problems with that. We're
supposed to fail at things that we've never done before
until we learn enough through our failure to learn how to
walk, how to talk, how to use the toilet. . . and on and
on. But as adults we put the pressure on ourselves
and somehow expect ourselves to succeed the first time, no
matter what. And sometimes we can-- if I were to try
to build a bookcase that I've never built before tomorrow,
I'd be able to do so because of previous experience.
On the other hand, though, if I were to try to fix my
car's fuel injection system, I'm sure I'd make quite a few
mistakes before I was successful.
We
will fail, but that's no reason to become
discouraged. It is, in fact, a reason to tell
ourselves that we're now better off than we were before
because now, we know more than we knew before we tried
something and didn't quite succeed at it. How we
react most definitely is our choice to make.
|
