In Part I of this blog series, you learned the mathematical equation to achieving success and happiness in your life. The equation is:
Happiness = (Life’s Events You Can Control + Life’s Events You Can’t Control) + Your Response
We then went on to examine those events in your life that you can control and concluded that the best way to deal with such events is to in fact do what we can to exercise control over those events. Manipulate, shape and mold those events to suit your purposes as much as possible.
The critical factors that determine how you will be able to control those events, we learned, are your willingness to take responsibility for your life and your ability and willingness to take massive action towards the achievement of your goals and desires.
We learned in Part II of this blog series that the approach to dealing with Life's Events You Can't Control is to ACCEPT THEM. We must accept those things in life which, by their very definition, we have no control over.
Anything less than acceptance of things we can’t control is futile and leads to nothing but stress and frustration.
Crafting an Empowering Response
This final part in the bog series is about adopting an empowering response to everything that happens to you in your life. Life is about the meaning you attach to life’s events. Regardless of what actually happens in your life, you ALWAYS have the ability to determine what meaning you give to a particular event, occurrence or thing.
In the end, two different people will often have diametrically opposed responses to the same life event. One person will adopt a negative, disempowering meaning, while another chooses a more positive empowering meaning. Ultimately the choice is ALWAYS ours. And the approach we take will determine how that event or occurrence will shape our lives, from simple insignificant things that occur everyday to life changing events and transactions that happen only occasionally.
Some people don’t agree with this approach, but it is the true nature of things. Opponents feel that certain life events are negative and can only be interpreted in a negative way while other life events are positive and can be interpreted positively. A death can only be negative, for instance. Someone losing their job can only be negative. A person winning the lottery can only be positive. A person receiving a promotion is inherently positive.
That approach is both simplistic and naive and leaves a person far too few options to allow an empowering response. The choice of what meaning you give to an event is entirely yours. What makes a life event positive or negative is solely a matter of interpretation and you are the person who is tasked with the job of fashioning that interpretation.
Take for instance someone who loses his job. The person’s response to the loss of his job can vary from opposite ends of the extreme. I use this example because it actually happened to some friends of mine a few years ago. Two of my friends had similar executive positions with the same company. Both had been there for many years, were of similar age and were very comfortable and set in their ways. When the parent company announced that their particular facility would be closing down, both executives lost their job. One of them was devastated. He felt it would be difficult to find a similar job, was afraid of what the future held going forward and went into a deep depression for many months before he could accept what had happened and move on. His health, finances and family life were deeply affected in a negative way.
The other chose a different approach. He immediately accepted the reality of the situation and resigned himself to the fact that things would need to change. Rather than sulk, fret and agonize over the situation, he chose to take a more empowering approach to the challenge. He had always toyed around with using his knowledge and expertise gained from his many years of employment in a consulting business and decided that the loss of his job presented the perfect opportunity to pursue this option. So he got a part-time job with a local company doing some executive work so he could pay the bills and opened up his consulting business on the side. Within 9 months, he had landed enough new consulting clients that he was able to quit his part-time employment and devote his full attention to his new business. His business is now flourishing and he makes more money than he ever did at his original company and enjoys the work he does immensely. When he thinks about what had happened only months earlier, he recognizes that the loss of his job was the most fantastic thing that happened to him in years. In fact, the job loss per se was neither positive nor negative. It was his response to the job loss that allowed him to cast a positive spin on the life event.
The Neurolinguistic Programming Approach
We can learn a lot of valuable lessons on fashioning an empowering response from NLP. A fundamental presupposition of neurolinguistic programming is particularly applicable here.
It goes as follows:
THERE IS NO FAILURE, ONLY FEEDBACK.
In other words, we must look for the more empowering meaning behind everything that happens. When something doesn’t work out the way we planned or expect, rather than label that something a failure, we can choose to look for an empowering meaning that serves us. At the most basic level, if all we do is learn something that will help us in the future, a “failed” attempt can be transformed into a positive learning experience.
The question that I leave you to contemplate for another day is, how does one craft an empowering response that propels them forward?
I invite you to share your thoughts on the question below.
Until next time,
Make each day count!
Pat Filice
