Resilience Tips: All Lessons Are the Same
By Sandy Davis, a.k.a. "The Resilience Guy"
Life Is Made Up of Lessons
From the day you are born until the day you die, you have endless opportunities to learn new things. When you make it a practice to stay in the flow of never-ending learning, you can continuously experience the excitement of being fully alive.
When you stop learning new lessons, life has a way of becoming less invigorating. You can become a prisoner of the status quo you created for yourself some time ago. Unless you keep pushing the walls of that container outward, you will likely find yourself becoming bored and/or dispirited. Indeed, you can end up feeling incarcerated in a prison cell of your own making.
When you become lazy and stop making the effort required to learn new things, life loses it color and its ability to entrance you. On the other hand, the moment you commit to learning something new, life has a way of re-engaging you.
All Lessons Are the Same
Given that lessons are foundational building blocks of our personal experience, pause for a moment and consider this: All lessons are fundamentally the same.
The process of learning something new is a universal process. It entails recognizing and validating new information, and then figuring out how to incorporate that new information into your ways of thinking and acting. More often than not, it also entails making adjustments in how you behave. These behavioral changes, be they miniscule or major, can in turn lead first to experiential awakenings, and ultimately to “in-your-bones” wisdom.
Every new lesson you tackle will afford you countless opportunities to grow, to change, and to develop yourself. Sometimes mastering a new lesson leads to a keener sense of awareness and/or expanded meaningfulness. Sometimes it leads to your replacing a long-standing habit with a new one that is more life-sustaining. And occasionally mastering even a small lesson can open the door to your permanently changing your “way of being.”
Every Lesson Has Its Challenges
Every time you set about learning a new lesson, no matter how small, you will face challenges that require you to stretch, strengthen yourself, adapt, and overcome. These challenges will require you to move outside of your present comfort zone. They will serve to shake up your personal status quo, and they will invite you to explore new territory.
This is true when you decide to learn the lesson that eating nutritious food is good for your body, your mind, and your spirit. This is true when you decide to learn the lesson that regular vigorous exercise enhances your vitality. This is also true when you decide to learn how to play a new musical instrument, or how to speak a new foreign language, or how to paint your first watercolor.
In order to learn each of these lessons, you need to make a commitment to the new results you want to create for yourself, and then you need to take persistent action to move yourself intentionally in the direction of those desired results.
As you do this work, you will invariably encounter your own inner resistance to change. You will have to work through your own points of resistance one by one. There are no shortcuts.
In the end, it’s the doing that makes us grow. Without ongoing deliberate practice, we cannot break through to new levels of mastery. Just thinking, wishing, and hoping won’t do the trick. Learning a new lesson always requires committed action and a resolute determination to overcome whatever challenges the lesson presents to us.
Call to Action
Given that all lessons are fundamentally the same, all you need to do to re-vitalize your personal status quo is prove to yourself that you are capable of mastering one single new lesson.
Go ahead and choose one lesson that connects you with some of your deepest passions and that inspires you to learn and grow. Then set about mastering that one lesson. Figure out what one or two behaviors you will need to deliberately practice in order to master the lesson you have chosen, and then weave those particular activities into some sort of “bite-sized” simple daily practice.
You can master just about any lesson if you are willing to apply yourself to learning it for at least 15 highly-focused minutes every day. If you practice at least this amount for 90 consecutive days, you will no doubt be impressed with how much you have learned and how much you have changed.
Once you have done this 90-day experiment and have compiled compelling proof that you are still capable of “learning new tricks,” whatever lesson you choose to tackle next will be all the easier to master. You will have started to acquire an affinity for personal change, and you will also benefit from developing “personal change momentum.”
By the way, once you master a given lesson, a follow-on lesson will always present itself. That’s the way life works.
Just remember that in the end, all lessons are fundamentally the same.
Relevant Quotations:
“Once you’ve done the mental work, there comes a point (where) you have to throw yourself into the action and put your heart on the line.” – Phil Jackson, Basketball Coach
“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races, one after another.” – Walter Elliott, Priest and Missionary
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” – Yogi Berra
You are welcome to re-publish the above article in its entirety either on a web site or in a blog, providing you do not change the article and you include the following attribution in its entirety:
Copyright © 2010 Alexander M. (Sandy) Davis. To find out more about Sandy Davis and the resilience-related guides and services he offers, visit www.ResilienceWorks.com. To subscribe to his free monthly e-newsletter, send an e-mail to Subscribe@ResilienceWorks.com. FYI, he’s “The Resilience Guy.”