“Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it. . . . It’s just easier if you do.” —Byron Katie
1: Something bad happens.
Did it happen to us? Or, for us?
How we answer that question determines the trajectory of our lives.
Because we have a choice, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy write in The Gap and The Gain: The High Achiever’s Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success.
We can either choose to live in the GAP, where we measure where we are now versus our idealized future. Being in the GAP makes us unhappy.
Or, we can live in the GAIN, where we measure where we are now backward versus where we started. The GAIN gives us power over the direction of our lives.
“Being in the GAP puts us in the passenger seat of our own experiences,” Dan and Ben write. “We’re reactive to whatever happens—and when things don’t go how we expected or wanted, then we’re the powerless victim.
“Whenever we frame an experience in the GAP,” they note, “we lose power and ownership over that experience It’s just a ‘crummy thing’ we wish hadn’t happened.”
Because we see what has happened as negative, we often miss the opportunity for learning and growth.
Living in the GAIN is very different.
With this mindset, we are “in the driver’s seat of our own life,” Dan and Ben write. We “decide what our experiences mean. We decide how we’ll frame them, and we always find ways to utilize our experiences to improve our future.
“Even seemingly terrible experiences are the springboard for amazing clarity and growth.”
It’s not win or lose. It’s win or learn.
Instead of wishing “bad” things didn’t happen, we look for ways to take difficult experiences and find value, meaning, or lessons we can apply.
Whatever happens to us, we use it “to transform and improve” ourselves, the authors write. “Meaning and value aren’t given to us. We create our own meaning and value for every experience.”
As Dan explains: “Everyone who grows achieves their progress and improvement by transforming frustrating and painful failures into rules and measurements for satisfying success.”
3: This mindset is powerful. And it’s more than just a mindset. We can also do things differently.
Good things happen in our lives because of the actions we took when we were in a difficult period or a “valley,” Dr. Spencer Johnson writes in his book Peaks and Valleys.
Conversely, bad things often occur in our lives because of what we did during our “peaks.”
We experience a peak when everything is going great. A valley is when life is challenging.
“A valley could be a health problem,” Dan and Ben observe. “It could be a financial crisis. It could be losing your job. It could be losing a close friend or a child.
“We all go through valleys at various points in our lives. But again, as Spencer explains, The good things in our lives happen BECAUSE of what we do in our valleys. When we go through a valley, we can learn from that valley or be frustrated by it.
“The choice is ours. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. If we embrace our valleys and learn from them, we can use what we’re going through to create far bigger peaks in our future.
“But only if we view those valleys as a GAIN rather than a GAP.”
More next week!
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Reflection: What valleys am I experiencing in my life right now? What can I learn from this experience? Are there any actions I can take to create a future peak?
Action: Journal about my answers to the questions above.
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