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EXPERIENCE TEACHES YOU WHAT WORKS FOR YOU - AND WHAT DOESN'T!
Too many of us live in our minds, of shoulds, musts, have-tos, selfish emotions, and machinations of indoctrinations (by parents, government, education, media, religion and people & things we love and respect), instead of our world of experiences.
It doesn't matter whether it's love, job/career, relationships, happiness, fulfillment, etc. it all comes down to knowing what works for you. How? Through experiences! That means getting up off your butt and living. Can you really purchase a house without knowing whether that house is going to work with who and what you are? But how do you get that information? Through experience, you accumulate data about what works and doesn't work for a fulfilling life (self knowledge). And this is a very individual occurrence. Once again journaling or keeping a diary helps tremendously for self analysis.
If we counted on our experiences as a pathway to discovering what works for us, as time passes, life experiences would become richer and filled with many levels or degrees of life's pleasures. You'd make fewer repetitions of the same errors, because your judgment would be based on your experiences - not what someone told you or some whim by a group of people who say the love you or are your friends.
Truth is in your experiences. It's knowledge you get about self and reality first hand. Everything else is second hand knowledge. For example: Let's say a White person brings no baggage from media, relatives and friends regarding Black folk. Let's say this person goes to the mall and has a negative experience with a Black male teen who totally disrespected him/her. A positive one with the Black female clerk behind the counter where you made a purchase. And another positive one where a Black man held the door for you to go through.
What experience will you remember the most? Most likely the negative one with the Black male teen. Nevertheless, what was the truth of your experience at the mall. You had 3 encounters with Black folk with 2 being positive and one negative. Although you had the one bad experience, can you really make a generalization of All Black Teens from that one encounter? Some people do! They don't look at all the other encounters they may have had with Black teens that weren't negative, in their assessment.
And the assessment goes a few ways: What was your behavior? What was your state of mind? Did you go in with pre-conceived ideas about others? Did you show fear? Or did you show the same temperment as you would have, if you had encountered 'one of your own'?
The more encounters, the better one can make an assessment as to how to navigate through life. As an American Black, I found my path through my experiences which had shown me All White Folk Weren't Racist. When it comes to dealing with all people, any pre-conceived ideas need to be left out allowing me to see clearly, how they will respond to me and my behavior - so I can move from Point A to Point B with little friction.
So when we look at your experience, it's mostly all about you and HOW YOU RESPONDED TO THE EVENT! This information you receive is self knowledge. The more you become aware of how your responses, not only interact but control the outcomes of events, you begin to take more and more control of your responses - thus your life. This is an example of how YOU CREATE YOUR OWN REALITY THROUGH YOUR BELIEFS AND BEHAVIOR!
IT'S NOT THE EVENT, IT'S HOW YOU RESPOND TO IT! People are fearful of others because that's how they've been conditioned to respond by the aforementioned outside influences. But do they have to be fearful? Absolutely not! A fearful person can't bring out the humanness of another, allowing easy movement from point A to point B. The person (with self worth) seeing an angry human being, recognizes that anger and dispels it. The fearful sees anger and exacerbates it with more anger, shouting, and possible violence (feeling threatened).
Selling (successfully) and living a successful life are very much alike. They're both based on the numbers game. In selling, not everybody will buy from you. You give your best sales pitch consistently, going through your leads (potential customers). The more contacts you make the greater your chance of a sale. People buy from you because you have a good product and they like you. In the experience of turning sales you pick up information regarding how a customer responds to you - when a customer is unsure, their need for your product, whether they like you, too much product, too little, price problems, distracted, etc. These are keys to what you need to do to get them to say, YES, to a sale.
The same happens with life. Through life experiences I've learned there is a position within me I can operate from that maximizes my experiences with others. It's the same area I come from when I'm selling. Really, it was the selling experiences that made me discover this place even existed within me. So I extended it into everything I did and found my life kept improving in ways I wanted it - love, relationships, income, disputes or disagreements, family, interaction with strangers, business, etc. It's not a matter of acting phony because this area, within, is STILL a part of who and what I am.
The truth of life isn't in what people tell us. The truth of life is in our experiences. Now, a problem can arise from your interpretation of that experience due to possible conflicting and/or invalid beliefs about self and reality. But we'll deal with that on another occasion.
BEING IN THE MOMENTS OF OUR EXPERIENCES IS THE REAL TEACHER IN HOW TO DEAL WITH LIFE. JUST LIKE REAL LEARNING COMES FROM OBSERVATION AND DOING, OR DOING, ALONE.
QUESTION EVERYTHING! THAT'S WHERE THE TRUTH RESIDE.
Not if you are a neo-con, true idiocy is re-applying the same treatment to
a policy and expecting a different result. Does anyone remember the
Viet-Nam war???
