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Devastated By Life? Pick Yourself Up, Dust Off And Start Again
Let’s face it, no matter who you are or what your dreams are, things will go wrong. Jobs might fall through, you might have to make some changes, or maybe circumstances you can’t control will cause more problems for you. You might have hit rock bottom, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay there.
Most people give up after their first taste of failure, and if you’ve hit rock bottom, giving up seems like an excellent idea. But it’s not the only idea. If you’ve gone far enough to hit rock bottom, then chances are you haven’t been taking the easy road in life. So why start now?
There’s a lot of stigma around starting over, but it isn’t always the reset back to zero that we tell ourselves it is.
What Does Starting Over Mean?
For most people, starting over means that we are back at zero. All the progress that we’ve made is wiped out, and we are back at the starting line to do the entire process over again. However, that’s not true.
Let’s say you want to be a painter. You’ve studied painting, had painting teachers, built a network of painters, and have even gotten your art purchased by a few people. Emboldened by your success, you decide to show off your work in a local art gallery, thinking that more people might buy it. But no one does.
After that failure, life starts to push you around. You have expenses that suddenly start to pop up, you spend less and less time painting, and pretty soon, you wonder why you even started at all. It’s been so long since you’d painted that you doubted that you’d be able to do anything more than start over.
Look At Your Entire Journey
But starting over doesn’t mean that we lose all the process we made. If you had been painting for ten years, studied under teachers and mentors, and built a network, all that stuff is carried over with you when you start over. In fact, by starting over now, you actually have more benefits than you did when you first started with nothing. According to David Goggins, this is the foundation of his ‘Cookie Jar method.’
Picking yourself up and throwing yourself back into the breach doesn’t have to be a sad affair. Instead, you go back in with more experience and a knowledge of what didn’t work. By looking at your entire journey, you can see being devastated by life not as an isolated event but rather as a speedbump on your trail.
Reflection In Starting Over
The one thing that you always need to do when starting over is to reflect. Take a look at what didn’t work. What led to life devastating you? Chances are, you might see a pattern or a root cause. Maybe it was a chance you didn’t take, perhaps you didn’t listen to some advice, or perhaps it was just bad luck.
Reflecting keeps you from making the same mistakes over and over again and can be a great ally in seeing the changes you need to make to prevent this from happening again. Then you can get back into the breach and find success this time around.
Don’t Be Afraid to Restart
So many people are scared of restarting that they never try it, thinking that there’s no point. Instead, if you can tell yourself that you are ‘starting again’ rather than starting over, you’ll be able to stand back up and learn from your mistakes. Then, instead of being pushed around by life, you can start pushing back to achieve your goals
