Take charge of your life.part 2

In previous post i had shared two strategies for turning adversity to advantage.

ASSUME RESPONSILBILTY FOR YOURSELF

MAKE TOUGH CHOICES

In this post i am sharing next two strategies.

SEEK RELATIONSHIPS THAT ENRICH YOUR LIFE

Relationships are the web of our life; they influence how we think, feel and behave. At times they affect the course of our lives. Successful people frequently told us they had friends or mentors who guided them through the early years of their careers.

Even a casual acquaintance or a stranger may have a deep impact on our lives. In 1958, near the height of his career, baseball great Roy Campanella was paralyzed in an accident. About a year later, he was sitting in his wheelchair at a park when an elderly woman worked her way up to him. She had braces on her legs, and walked with a crutch.

When the stranger reached Campanella, she took his helpless hand in hers and thanked him for giving her the courage to live. She had been a patient in the same New York hospital he had been in. after a stroke paralyzed one side of her body, she gave up on life. But doctors at the hospital told her about Campanella's courage, and the woman was so inspired by his story that she determined to make the effort to live. She later traveled nearly two thousand kilometers to thank him in person, thus giving back to Campanella some of the inspiration and courage that he had instilled in her.

AFFIRM SELF-WORTH

Typically, a crisis undermines one's self-esteem, which, in turn. Makes it all the more difficult to deal with the crisis. In our interviews, we found that those who were able to affirm a sense of self worth were less likely to feel helpless and more likely to influence events and explore options- when faced with adversity.

Take paul, for instance, a successful newspaper reporter in a large city. He went to America, at the age of six, as a refugee. His early experiences as a schoolboy who could speak no English were painful. He found himself either fighting over or running from the taunts of his classmates, and developed what he calls a “Refugee mentality.” this showed up in such typical sentiments as “Don't make waves,” “Be thankful you're here,” “it's not your turn.”

then came a summer-camp job and with it a turning point. “The most prestigious position at the camp, that of waterfront director, was offered to me because I had the necessary qualifications,” Paul told us. “As usual, I heard this voice in my head reminding me, it's not your turn to win. You're not on the first team. Unexpectedly, like a light being switched on, it all fell into place . “Some day' was now. It wasmy turn. So I said yes,”

Paul isn't sure why he got that flash of insight. But the moment changed his life and freed him “to be myself in what had become my world.”

WE DON'T automatically incorporate good ideas into our lives. We grow by choosing to gro, by responding positively to what happens to us.

Three researchers studied 22 people who had won $ 50000 or more in a lottery; seven had won $ 1 million each. The researchers asked the winners to rate themselves on how happy they are at this atge of their lives, how happy they expected to be in a couple of years and the pleasure they got from seven things : talking with friend, watching TV, having breakfast, listening to a joke, receiving a compliment, reading a magazine and buying new clothes. The researchers also asked the same questions of a group of non-winners living in the same neighborhoods as the winners.

The lottery winners proved no happier than the non-winners neither did they expect greater future happiness. Moreover, they reported less pleasure from the seven activities than the non-winners did. While the winners gained a moment of exhilaration, it appears they lost some of their ability to enjoy commonplace pleasures. More than that, they failed to transform their watershed experience- winning the lottery- into an opportunity for growth.

You don't have to win the lottery to be a winner. All it takes is recognizing a watershed experince for life-shaping value it has- and acting upon it.

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