Don’t Let an Experience Define You

How often do we have something happen to us and when it didn't work out the greatest, we think 
"I'm a failure"
"I can't do anything right"
"Why the heck did I even think I could do that?"
"Who was I kidding thinking that I could do that?"
"I feel like such a fool"
"People must be laughing their heads off at me"
"You can be sure I'll never do that again"
and on and on and on.....

Instead we should be celebrating the fact that we had the courage to do something different; of if it's a situation that just happened upon us without our initiating it, then celebrate the fact that you made it through and you survived. That is a really big accomplishment.

You're not a failure because something didn't go perfectly or turned out wrong. Just as you're not a success when something does go "right" (however you define "right"). We are not failures or successes - all or none. We have experiences but we aren't the experience or the result.

I know, I have frequently defined myself as a failure when I screwed something up (like I can control everything? I don't think so). I've written this before but I initially felt like a failure at the ATY race in December-January. But when I got my head back on straight, i realized several things:
-I was not a failure because it didn't go as well as I'd hoped (that is also pretty conceited). One thing doesn't make someone anything. It's just a happening
-Even though there were somethings that didn't go well or as well as i wanted, there were other things that went really well. They just hadn't been on my pre-recorded list of what would make me a success. So, I discounted them initially. Later I realized those things and their results were actually more important than those other "goals" on my list. That was cause to celebrate even more.
- This realization did not make ME a Success. It made me continue to be Terrie with new data to analyze and incorporate somehow into my daily existence.

That's all that experiences are. They do not define you. They simply give you information to plug into that amazing computer in your head. How it's interpreted is a function of the programs you've created and installed in that computer. As they say "garbage in, garbage out". If you interpret objective events as bad and have programmed that into your computer, the result will be more of the same - "I am bad. I am a failure. I did badly. I suck" etc.. Most of these programs were developed and installed when we were kids. They all need updates. Things have changed. If we don't do maintenance and check things out periodically, we continue to run defective programs (our beliefs) and we resist change - especially any challenge to change our beliefs. If you were told you were a failure or bad when you were a kid, you immediately went to the programmer inside of you, they created this automatic system that would say "if I do this" or "if i don't do that" THEN "I am a failure". If it played over repeatedly as it did in my case, then the program runs day and night. It's only when you shut it down and do a reinstall adding a "patch" that blocks those security breaches, that it can now interpret the data that's inputted differently. Now it might say "If I did that" or "if I didn't do that" THEN "i learned something and it's my job to figure out what I learned and add it to the database."

Can you think of times in your life when you though that an experience made you this or that? Can you look back and see how your first or automatic response really wasn't accurate? The key is to recognize that a first thought is just the automatic program. Hit the escape button and then rerun the program and see what you come up with.