What Have You Been Through?

I’m not going to act like life is easy. Life is full of stressful situations, heartbreaking moments, times when we’re disappointed in ourselves and others, and everyone has their own version of it. When people say “everything happens for a reason”, sometimes it’s hard to believe them because it’s hard to justify the pain you’re feeling. But if we take a moment to understand the intention of that expression, it’ll start to feel a little more true.

What if everything that happens has a purpose? What if everything is perfectly designed to help you evolve into the person you’re meant to become? If we choose to assign that meaning to the events of our life, it suggests that there’s a reason for what we’re going through and it creates a sense of hope that things will get better.

Everything in life is the story we tell about it. Our mind desperately wants to create meaning from the facts of our lives. But that meaning is entirely interpreted. The facts are what happened, which is neither good or bad, up or down. It’s the meaning we take from the facts that determines the emotional reaction we have, and the impact it has on us.

Let me use a personal example to demonstrate this. The first time I ran my 21 day challenge, only 5 people signed up for it. Better yet, only 3 of those 5 people even started it. And even better, at the end the only person of t that was still engaged in it was my fiance.

Those are the facts. Now let’s look at the meaning.

There was a part of me that wanted to feel bad for myself and how I put all this time into creating a challenge and only my fiance completed it. There was a part of me that wanted to quit and conclude that I’m a failure and it’s never going to work. But then another part of me told me to persevere, that this was a great experiment that taught me a lot, and that one day I’m going to use this example to inspire?people who are confronting what they perceive as failure.

Those two different stories come from two different parts of me, applying two different meanings to the same set of facts. Fortunately, I chose the more empowering story, persevered, and recruited over 20 people for the next cohort!

Now here’s the most important part. How did that positive story win out over the negative one? I believe it’s because of the years I’ve put into my self-growth. My habit of reflecting on gratitude every single day has trained my mind to see positivity in the world, and showing up for myself has trained in me a self-discipline that makes it painful to quit.

The reason I shared all of that is to show you how we can choose to see that “everything happens for a reason”. And when we do that, we see that what we’ve been through is just the required training ground for us to become who we’re destined to be, creating the impact only we can create.