Surviving Covid-19 Mentally — There are no failures in life — only lessons
There are no failures in life. Stop and think about that saying for a minute. Maybe you think that saying is crazy or impossible. Because, after all, how many of us are saying we’re feeling like a failure or feeling defeated right now?
I know I have felt like that a few times during this pandemic and needed to snap myself out of the downward spiral of feeling defeated and depressed. The embarrassment of having to ask for a deferral on my mortgage, of begging the bank for an emergency business loan (as both of my businesses are event based and have been overlooked by the Canadian Government for any type of financial aid/loans) and trying to figure out how to make my businesses and marriage survive this huge storm has, at times, made me feel defeated and like I was failing at life. But I wasn’t and neither are any of you out there.
Stop and think about this — there are no failures in life, only lessons. Have we learned from this? Absolutely!
These are tough times and having to ask for help is not a failure. It shouldn’t be embarrassing either. It’s part of being human.
What we all need to do right now is to make a decision — the decision to no longer feel defeated or depressed ever again in our lives. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to start thinking life is all roses and wonderful when it’s not. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t facing challenges in life right now or that
we’re being unrealistic. It simply means that we need to make a decision to stop thinking and feeling defeated and like we’re a failure. Because those emotions stop us from taking the positive actions that we need to take in life in order to change things and move us forward.
Stop and think about it — when you feel defeated and like a failure, how hard do you try to fix something or try to find a solution? But if we get into a more positive state, stand up and tell ourselves “I’m not going down without a fight” and look for every possible opportunity to enhance and change our lives, we feel more empowered to take action to better our situation. Sometimes we even end up seeing opportunities that we hadn’t even considered before!
Even though things look and seem impossible right now, we have to believe that we can turn things around. We are all facing challenges, disappointments and set-backs right now. But it’s how we choose and decide to deal with those challenges, disappointments and set-backs that will shape our future and
chance of finding happiness and success when this pandemic is all over.
We need to realize that none of this is forever. It’s only a temporary bump in the road of our lives! We can’t always control all the things and events that happen in our lives, but we can control the way we feel, think, believe and act to these events. Every moment we’re alive, we have to realize that we all
have the power to choose a new set of choices or actions. It’s our decisions and actions, not the condition of our lives that ends up determining our destiny in life.
How you live right now is the result of all of the decisions you have made in your life. The decisions you’ve made regarding what you believe and eat as well as the decision in how you feel and react to all the situations and challenges in your life. If we really want to change our lives we need to start with our decisions. We need to make different and better decisions in our lives such as the decision to not feel defeated and depressed, to find the things we are grateful for in life, to save more money, to be more connected to love ones, etc.
We also need to change the way we see things. We need to stop seeing this time as a major obstacle and defeat in our lives and instead it turn it around to see that it is actually just another hurdle in this crazy race we call life. This will not last forever! We won’t have to stay socially distanced forever. One
day businesses will thrive again and one day life will be good again. When this pandemic is all over and the next difficulty comes up in life, this time will just be a distance memory.
We have lived through every other tough time in our lives and we will live through this one too. Just think about it, you have survived every other difficult time and tough day in your life and you will survive this one too! Even when it’s not a pandemic, there are other things in life that put hurdles in our way. We have survived every bad year, every bad month, every bad week and every bad day up until now and we will continue to survive them in the future!
So how do we begin to get rid of these feelings of failure and defeat?
First, change your own self talk. We all have an inner villain in life. It tells us we can’t; we’re not worth it, that we failed. We need to shut that inner villain up and we can do that by changing the way we talk to ourselves. Instead of saying “I failed” change it to “I learned.” Because every single thing that happens our lives is a learning opportunity! We wouldn’t learn lessons if there were no difficult times in our lives and how boring would that be!
Secondly, when something isn’t working in our lives, sometimes all we need is a different approach. Often, we just need to step back, think about the situation, change a couple of things and try again. Most of the businesses that exist today wouldn’t have survived if they gave up after one try. There’s
always a lesson to be learned. After all, do we stop a toddler from trying to walk? No we encourage them to keep trying different things until they get it. We don’t say “just give up now kid, you’re not destined to be a walker.” We need to look at our lives the same way and realize that life is always just
about adjusting things and trying again. For example did you know that Colonel Sanders of KFC was turned down 1009 times before he got his first yes? That Walt Disney was turned down by 302 banks before he got financing for Disney World? What would have happened if they would have given up after just a couple tries.
Third, we need to change how we talk about life and the metaphor’s we use to describe the situations in our life. Instead of saying things like “life sucks” change it to Forest Gump’s mentality of “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.” There’s many other ways to change the way you feel about a situation. Instead of saying that something in life sucks, change it to “well this is inconvenient.” Just making changes to the words we say when we talk about situations in our life can take our mood from being sour to being manageable.
After all, when we’re 90 years old, sitting in our rocking chairs, reflecting back on life, will we be happy with the way we reacted in life? If you give up on life right now and pass up opportunities because you’re stuck feeling defeated and depressed and therefore too blind to see those opportunities, will you
regret passing up or missing that opportunity? Or will you look back on this time and go, “yeah it was hard. Yes, I had rough days, but I decided to rise each time I fell, I opened my mind up to new possibilities, didn’t give up but instead changed things up then tried again and gave it my all. Because of
that, I lived a pretty amazing life in the end.”
Remember, life is always worth living! Sometimes we just have to look at it a little differently. No hurdle in life is worth giving up on and we will survive this pandemic just like we’ve survived every other difficulty in life before.
After all, life is sequence of one decisions — which one’s will you make?
Amanda Oling is a motivational and impaired driving prevention speaker with Northern Spirit Productions Inc. out of Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada. Her book “The Impact of One Decision” is available on-line through Chapters, Coles & Indigo Bookstores, Amazon and Kindle. You can find out more about Amanda, purchase her book or send her a request to speak at your event or in your community through her website at www.AmandaOling.com. Follow her on Facebook at Amanda Oling Motivational Speaker, Instagram @impact_of_one_decision, Twitter @impact_of_one and on Linked In by searching Amanda Oling.
