"How to feel nice and cosy and ..."

As I look back I realise that life has been good. Yet I have a nagging feeling that things could have been better if only ....

I guess this happens to all of us. This "How I wish... " is not about regrets about missed opportunities that did not come my way. It is about missed opportunities because of something I said or did which was not appropriate for the situation.

When I put my actions under the microscope couple of things seem to emerge.

90% of opportunities I missed were my own doing. Difficult to swallow but true. My father taught me that blaming others, blaming luck, blaming circumstances etc will make us feel good for the moment. The danger is that it will be like a nice warm blanket on a cold day. We would not want to get out of the warm blanket. In essence we would be happy to blame circumstances, other people, an unfair world etc. It feels nice and cosy but does not help.

Do you have the courage to put yourself under a microscope? And face facts? Face unpalatable truth? That is the first big step if you are ambitious and want to move forward.

We become victims of two kinds of thoughts:

"How I wish things had not happened, the way they did..."

"How I wish I had not done that.."

Let me deal with "How I wish I had not done that..."

Here is a way to get the most out of this line of thought.

1. What did I want from the situation?
2. What was most efficient and effective way to get what I wanted?
3. What did I do in that situation?
4. What do I wish I had done instead?
5. Why didn't I do that? What stopped me? What came in the way?

Whenever I faced difficult situations where I did not get the results I wanted, this line of thinking opened new possibilities. It helped get out of the prison of my mental block.

This line of thinking drives action and results. It protects us from feeling like victims. (A friend once told me that 'playing victim is warm and cozy, you would forever want to stay there. It is like the frog in a vessel of water that is being heated. Initially it feels nice and cozy. But when it start getting really hot, it is too late... he also quoted the name of the person who said. I forget who.)