Lessons - Nov 18 2019

Let’s imagine for a minute, that life is a practice. In front of you sits a large set of paths to walk (almost infinite) and as you choose to walk along a path you will undoubtedly encounter obstacles, problems to overcome

You make think you successfully solved a problem and move past it only to discover the exact same problem just a little further down the path. Perhaps it is slightly different, but essentially it is the same problem, and yet the solution causes pain and frustration, why do I have to be ‘here’ again?

If life is a series of lessons and we must ‘learn’ from these lessons in order to move on, then does this mean when we seem to encounter the same ‘problem’ over and over there is something missing? Some lesson we have not have learned?

I can think of at least 3 definite occasions in my adult life where “*stuff*” was taken away from me. In my first job as Quality & Systems Manager, I was ‘on top of the world’, managing our companies quality system, only for new more ‘senior’ people to be hired and I ‘fell’ to the bottom of the totem pole feeling deflated, rejected, and hurting my self-confidence.

Later at CGI, I built myself up, lots of confidence in myself, was having a great time for many years, when again it all falls apart. This time it seemed existing staff needed to ‘exhort’ their more senior experience, taking a project out of my hands and ‘reworking’ it in a way that ultimately would cause the project to fail. (or at least 'fail' from my point of view)

At my current job; I can’t even seem to ‘climb’ the ladder and build myself into being ‘on top’, and yet even STILL, I feel my manager taking away design work from me that I felt I was really making good progress on.

So I essentially am encountering the same situations over and over but I fail to see how I could do anything differently, the new senior people at Mathis, the desire for others to ‘redo’ the project ‘their way’ and a managers need to “take over” do not appear to be ANYTHING in my control.

What is in my control is my response to these events, how much I let them damage and erode my belief in myself, so the lesson I can try to learn is how do I teach myself bounce back quickly after such ‘external’ setbacks?